This was me a few days ago. I was feeling so crushed, so discouraged, so helpless, so angry. I had just discovered what Dr. Vigna had written about ACOG. He wrote this over a year ago, long before I started petitioning ACOG, long before Project Angel and many others sent in our devastating personal testimonies, long before I received a HORRIBLY DISMISSIVE letter from Dr. Chris Zahn from ACOG, long before my conversations with Dr. Sandra Carson, vice president of ACOG. In other words what I discovered is that Dr. Hal Lawrence, Dr. Chris Zahn and Dr Sandra Carson have known for a very long time about the existence of Pudendal Neuralgia. They have known for a very long time that transvaginal mesh is causing Pudendal Neuralgia. They have known for a very long time about the need to educate doctors about Pudendal Neuralgia and yet they are continuing to play dumb in the face of our despair, our agony, our desperation.

These are Dr. Vigna's words:

First, as a physician I must say the medical community has failed in mobilizing to protect and treat these women. There has been an utter lack of leadership from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologist. Simply by making a mandatory Continued Medical Education requirement for clinicians to participate in that describes the symptoms of pudendal neuralgia could have saved significant distress for women turned away by uneducated ears. To date I am unaware that American Medical Systems, JNJ, Boston Scientific, and Caldera informed their implanting surgeons of the symptoms of pudendal neuralgia which is clearly the most severe medical complication from both a properly placed mesh device or a malpositioned device which is an expected outcome of the flawed design.

Here is the link to his article: http://www.meshmedicaldevicenewsdesk.com/pudendal-neuralgia-and-pelvic-mesh-serious-injury-serious-decisions/

The despair that I felt was crushing. The apathy of an institution that is supposed to be helping us is devastating.

I am trying to regain my focus and my balance now. I have a very important genital/pelvic pain Awareness Exhibit coming up next week. It will be my third year raising awareness during Newton Open Studios and it will be my first year raising about the dangers of mesh. I want to be calm, peaceful, grateful and centered for the exhibit. I know that I will have many visitors and I want to enjoy the support and the appreciation that is being offered me.

How do I find balance? Always by returning to my creativity, to my curiosity... I have been wanting to create necklaces from opal mermaid tails. But I couldn't find opal mermaid tails. What I have found are opal whale tails. And though at first I resisted the whale tails because I wanted mermaid tails....The change came when I realized that maybe the whale tail was trying to tell me something. Maybe at this moment in time I didn't feel a connection to the whale because I just wanted a mermaid but maybe now was my moment to connect to the whale!

And so I searched for whale symbolism and came across the What's-Your-Sign.Com blog by Avia and this is what I found.

"Those who are magnetized by whale energy will tend to be incredibly deep in sensitivity. The depth of feeling whale-totem-people endure can be overwhelming. Whale people are super-perceptive about the feelings of those around them, and this can manifest into an internal pressure that can be quite crushing. The whale can help with overwhelment of feelings and even temper the onslaught of emotions picked up from other people too. If you are extraordinarily affected by the emotions of others, or your own emotions are so intense as to cause discomfort, your whale totem can help.

Why? Because whales are masters of:

• Navigation: Moving through emotional depths
• Communication: Effectively expressing emotional experiences
• Conservation: Using emotional energy for fuel and not being consumed by emotional floods"

Here is the link to the blogpost: http://www.whats-your-sign.com/celtic-symbols.html

I have yet to read and explore more in depth what this all means to me. All I know is that I can't burn myself out. I can't keep on feeling crushed and desperate. I have to restore peace, equanimity, faith. At the same time I am determined to get Pudendal Neuralgia into the curricula. Now even more so then before. 

How do I make this happen without destroying myself in the process?

There is still a part of me that wants to believe that Dr. Sandra Carson really does want to help us. I don't want to burn my bridges, Dr. Carson can you hear me? Do you want to help us? Can you understand how important it is to create guidelines, educational objectives and curricula for Pudendal Neuralgia today?

Do you know of the 100,000 and more women that are being destroyed by transvaginal mesh for prolapses and urinary incontinence? And if you know and you have the power to change this are you working towards creating change? We need you. We need your help. Can you hear me?

Atara Schimmel

Wow, I just discovered an incredible poet and inspiration.

I am humbled and inspired. I love that combination.
 
https://youtu.be/BadlHRCah6k


https://youtu.be/9PA0v9ANTrY


Goddess bless you!!!!!

The sacred healing tent of self-compassion.

We sit together here.

In this tent.

Some of us cannot sit.

Some of us can only lay.

And so we lay together.

In this tent.

Our bodies racked with pain.

Our souls fighting agony, desperation and despair.

Still, we sit, we lay together.

We share our prayers with each other.

We share our blessings with one another.

When one hurts the other helps.

When one helps the other hurts.

It doesn't matter who or when or why.

What matters is that we care for each other.

What matters is that we see our kindness in each others souls.

What matters is that together there is still a reason, a hope, a moment to stay alive for.

If we hold tight onto each other.

Just like this.

Holding hands.

Even as we lay with agony by our sides, with agony inside.

What matters is that we teach each other to love, to love ourselves, to forgive ourselves, to bless ourselves.

And as we teach we heal. And as we teach we grow. And as we grow we celebrate.

We celebrate the strides we make. We celebrate the strides we made in the darkness all alone. We celebrate the strides we made in the light with our beloved community.

We grow to love, to love our community so deeply that there is no longer an I and a them.

We grow to love so deeply that we understand that taking care of ourselves means taking care of all of us.

We grow to love so deeply that giving becomes the very same as receiving.

We grow to love so deeply that our hearts are filled with this gratitude, this grace, this ever-present determination to fight not just our own fight....

For we see, we have come to feel, to know, that our fight is the one same fight,

We fight together and this way we are so much stronger, so much more complete, so much more full of grace ....

And gratitude becomes our daily prayer and our daily blessing

Snip snip snip with their scalpels.

Through soft tissue.

The softest tissues of our vaginas.

With their scalpels. In their white robes.

Snip. Snip. Snip, away.

Ever so daintily, with such precision, such focused concentration.

They say that they are healing us.

We believe them, blindly.

We let them into our vaginas. With their scalpels.

Snip. Snip. Snip. Away.

Ever so daintily. They implant into us polypropylene mesh. They tell us that it will help with urinary incontinence, it will help with prolapse.

What they don't tell is that:

Hundred of thousands of women are being butchered through their vaginas.

They don't tell us that our bodies reject mesh, that mesh erodes, damaging our nerves, our muscles, perforating our bowels....leaving us wishing we were dead.

They don't tell us that that thousands of women have committed suicide because of the excruciating nerve pain that they are left with.

What they don't tell us, those humans? in their white robes, cloaked in their medical expertise, armed in their years of medical 'education'....is that they are murdering us one by one through our vaginas.

Ever so daintily with focused attention and perfect precision...they implant us with poison....

When we return to their offices, desperate and begging for help, they tell us that we are crazy.

They lie through their teeth. They have already seen countless women walk through their office doors begging for help.

But they have no time to waste on their victims. They must prepare the table for the next woman.

Ever so daintily with perfect precision, each slice calculated, they gently, thoughtfully, ever so intentionally slice through our flesh...and ever so carefully, with focused precision, each tear calculated...they sever the tissues of our vaginas and implant us with poison...

Ever so carefully, with perfect precision, cloaked in their white robes...

I have been learning more and more about mesh and mesh injured women and the more I learn the more terrifying it becomes. It reminds me of the holocaust, of the nazi doctor Joseph Mengele and it reminds me of the factory 'farms'. I had a breakthrough last week with the animals. I performed a new poem that I wrote. It was powerful and I was brave and I am grateful that I was able to do it. I knew that if I could do that then I could do anything. This is the poem that I wrote and shared in a restaurant inhabited by about 70 to 80 people, many of them with meat or what I prefer to call by its real name, 'the flesh of tortured animals' on their plates. Truthfully if we can dine and wine on torture and agony why would we be surprised that women are being butchered through their vaginas for money. To me it is all the same. Joseph Mengele exists everywhere in different forms...factory farming and mesh are his siblings. We all have abusive people in our families. I am the last person to deny that evil exists everywhere and that it is happening right now underneath our noses. What is shameful is that we remain silent in the face of brutality be it to animals, to women or to....

I won't remain silent. Not about mesh and not about factory farming. This is the poem that I performed last Monday at the Muse in Provincetown. 

I introduced myself saying that I am sharing a new poem from my body of work called 'Poetry for the Gut' and then I began with confidence and with freedom in my heart.

'The floors of the slaughterhouse are covered, in blood.

But it's not the blood that makes it so bad.

The terror in their eyes and the nausea in their stomachs?

No, even that isn't what makes it so bad now, is it?

The screaming? Have you heard a pig, screaming?

They sound just like humans.

Have you seen a pig thrown into boiling water alive?

That's common practice in the meat industry.

But  maybe that's just not bad enough for you, is it?

How about a pig hanging from his feet, being skinned alive?

Can you hear the screaming now?

I am going to help you here, because something is clearly not coming through.

I am going to bring the factory so called 'farms' to you.

Pigs. Are. Confined. They cannot move. They cannot turn around. For months. They lose their mind. They bang their heads violently against the wall. They bite obsessively into iron bars.

Cold. Iron.

Is that what your heart is made of?

Trapped. Chained. Forsaken. Abused. Tortured.

Oh, and one more thing, baby pigs have their testicles ripped out of them. Beaten. Broken.

Violence. Greed.

And you, you call this an apatite?

You call this dinner? lunch? breakfast?

The next time you eat the flesh of a tortured pig I hope that a piece of you dies.

I hope that compassion grows into that dead piece of you.

I hope it grows fast because their screams are killing me.'

                                                                        Atara Schimmel

I think that this Monday I will perform the vagina poem. I will dedicate it to the 30 million american women and the significant but undocumented number of men that suffer from some form of pelvic/genital/sexual pain and I will dedicate it to the hundreds of thousands of mesh injured women. I feel so angry and desperate and I feel such a sense of urgency. I am so angry at what is being done to women. We are being destroyed systematically by surgeons through our vaginas. Oh my god. I just can't tell you how many times I have cried since reading and learning more and speaking to more and more women. If I wasn't doing my art I would want to die from it. It does the same thing that the holocaust does to me and that factory 'farming' does to me. Only that the difference here is that I feel that I CAN do something and I feel that I AM GOING TO DO SOMETHING MAJOR. I can't explain the feeling. I just know that I am going to burst and that I am going to be heard big time. I just have to protect myself. My own sensitivity can kill me. 

These paintings are in process. This one is going to say something like

 'Mesh sisters stay together.'

This one is going to say ' Mesh-injured sisters, I am praying for you.'

And to add joy onto joy, as though I have not suffered enough at the hands of an abusive older brother. Now I live next to a (recovering?) heroine addict, local street performer that is aggressive and abusive. I do not feel safe here.

I want to live in a safe and quiet space with a beautiful view of the sea with plenty of room inside my home to do my art. I want to live in peace and quiet. I want to be able to take care of myself. Goddess help me.

I have so much work to do. I have to be able to remain balanced, focused and peaceful in order to do my work in a way that won't hurt myself. Meeting mesh heads on is a meeting with the devil and this devil is dangerous and cruel. I need safety and peace to be able to meet the devil and fight him successfully.

Why are there abusive people everywhere? And will they ever get out of my hair?

I am not feeling loved or loving today. I was cursed and violently screamed at. I called the police and changed the locks on the door. My key has disappeared since last night, if it doesn't suddenly swim out of the toilet bowl or drop down from a star than either my crazy neighbor stole it or a workman that was here yesterday stole it. Needless to say I started looking for a new place to live. My little dream room in Provincetown with the gorgeous view of the sea is no longer safe for me.

I haven't started praying to the angels yet. But that will be next on the agenda. Oh, and one good thing, I practiced the guitar and made headway with the chords and I feel ready and prepared for my next lesson.

One day I am going to sing my troubles, oh they will sound so beautiful sung.

Atara, here is a blessing for you. I want you to know that I am proud of the incredibly important work that you are doing. I want you to know that I love you deeply and that I will do everything in my power to keep you safe and protected living in peace and in quiet.

I am working on a painting to raise awareness for mesh. I will submit it to the Provincetown Art Association's upcoming juried show. I can pray that it be seen and recognized and admitted into the show. Pray for me too. Together we can make it happen.

I did something brave tonight.

I performed this poem that I wrote today in front about 70 to 80 people at the Muse in Provincetown during Open Mic.

The Muse serves a lot of dead tortured animals and many of the people in the audience were dining on them.

I explained that this is a new poem from my new body of work called: Poetry for the Gutt

Here goes:

'The floors of the slaughterhouse are covered in blood.

But it's not the blood that makes it so bad.

The terror in their eyes and the nausea in their stomachs.

No, even that isn't what makes it so bad, now, is it?

The screaming. Have you heard a pig, screaming?

They sound just like humans.

Have you seen a pig thrown into boiling water alive?

That's common practice in the meat industry.

But, maybe, that's just not bad enough for you, is it?

How about a pig hanging from his feet, being skinned alive.

Can you hear the screaming now?

I am going to try to help you here, because something is clearly not coming through.

I am going to bring the factory so called 'farms' to you.

Pigs, Are. Confined. They cannot move. They lose their minds. They bang their heads against the walls. They bite obsessively into iron bars.

Cold. Iron.

Is that what your heart is made off?

Trapped. Chained. Forsaken. Abused. tortured.

Oh, and one more thing, baby pigs have their testicles ripped out of them. Beaten. Broken.

Violence. Greed.

And you, you call this an apatite?

You call this dinner? lunch? breakfast?

The next time you eat the flesh of a tortured animal I hope that a piece of you dies.

I hope that compassion grows into that dead piece of you.

I hope that it grows fast because their screams are killing me."

                                                                      -Atara Schimmel

I though that I might be booed of the stage but I wasn't. Few people clapped but the silence felt more appropriate anyway.

I dared myself to do it. It was easy. I want to speak my truth wherever I am regardless of how others will respond to it. That is their choice. My choice is to be brave and to honor every aspect of who I am and what I know to be true.

Congratulations Atara. I really am so proud of you. I love you to the moon and back and into the factory 'farms' and around the world and anywhere and everywhere that your beautiful light-footed feet may travel.

You are everything that I wish to be. You lived up to yourself big time tonight.

What a beautiful day!

What an absolutely beautiful beautiful beautiful day. The sunset was light blues and light pinks and I danced in the cold, to keep warm, to stay with the sunset and the seagulls and to feel the beauty fill my Spirit.

It has been hard to be away from my blog, hard to be away from myself that way. To not be able to write and express everything that I am going through is clearly a part and parcel of being terrorized. Yes, I have been and continue to be terrorized by my older brother, David. His reign of terror over me pretty much ended two years ago when my mother finally (after months of begging him to leave) had him removed from the house with a restraining order. He was taken out of the house by the police. I have never written about this in my blog though I lived through this all along. Somehow when we are abused we believe that we must stuff the abuse into the corner of our hearts. But every cell in my body wants to speak. And every cell in my body is creating through that hard-won place of victory. Victory over evil, Victory over someone else's desire to control, power, subjugate me. Victory over my own fear and over my own impenetrable silence. I don't want to be silent anymore not even for the sake of self-preservation. The truth is cruel, ugly and disgusting. The truth is that I have an older brother that has terrorized me and the rest of my family members for years now. The truth is that I no longer want to to be a silent victim. I want to express it all in the same way that I express and share everything about Pudendal Neuralgia. Sibling Abuse should be no different. Today I know that my older brother will try to hurt me as long as I am alive and that my silence will only chain me to his abuse, stifle my creativity and block the deeper truths of my expressions and of my art.

I came up against a wall in my own art recently and I think that through writing this I am beginning to understand what this wall is. Fear. Fear of David. Fear of his anger. Fear of his obsessive hatred of all of us. Fear of his desire to seek revenge. What will he do if he finds this? I know that he knows that I have a blog. I feel frozen. Frozen in fear. I have come so far. I have and continue to be a voice for so many when it comes to pelvic pain. But here I am frozen. I am scared of David. His hatred has become an obsession that will follow him for the rest of his life. I thought that he had moved on. I hadn't seen him for two years. Until I went back home. I went back home to celebrate my mom's birthday with her.  I wanted to hug her a lot.


But instead I had to defend myself in court. David tried to get a Harassment Prevention order against me. He hates me and my younger brother with a vengeance. He knows that as long as we are alive we will not allow him to further abuse and dominate our parents. He wants to come home to resume his reign of terror, his dictatorship. My parents with all of their feelings of guilt and compassion...would allow him to come home. Though they both have suffered through hell, they would suffer more. Me and my younger brother will no longer allow for this to happen. David has violated the restraining order and the trespassing order. His abuse has been documented by the Springwell Elderly Abuse Services. And yet, he remains unstoppable.

In his own mind, if he could only neutralize me and my younger brother than he could return home to control my parents. I have watched his sadism with my parents. He blames them for his own mental illness, for his botched up childhood, for his non-existent self-esteem....He blames them for everything. He hates our mother with a passion. Today he hates all of us with a passion.






Yes, it is. It is very scary to live with an older brother like David. Yes, it is. Mental illness has been in my family since I can remember. And while I plummeted into PN hell my father plummeted into a psychotic depression. And David did everything that he could do to control and dominate all of us.





































I worked very hard these past few weeks. I had to gather all of the police records and I had to prepare my "defense". Most of all, I had to finally internalize that I was not safe from harm as I had thought that I was. I was shocked that the courts would allow David to abuse me through the court system. Had he tried to do this in Newton he would have never gotten away with it. But because he no longer lives in Newton and because the courts in Concord do not know of his history he was able to get away with it. Apparently anyone can request a Harassment Prevention Order against anyone else. I had no choice but to go and defend myself. By the way, David "invited" my Mom to the same court over the summer, also seeking a 'Harassment Prevention Order" against her. Only that on the day of the hearing he didn't show up. In his own deranged mind he is the victim and he is seeking justice.
















The judge clearly thought that he was an idiot. To claim that I harass him with his history of violations ....But, I suffered. And the fact that I suffered gives David pleasure. I suffered from all of my PTSD symptoms. I was derailed for two full weeks. Living in fear. Reliving all of the physical symptoms of what I survived.

So now you know that Pudendal Neuralgia was only one of the devastating horrors that I was battling. My father's psychotic depression, his string of suicide attempts and psychiatric hospitalizations, his terrifying fall into a catatonia-like state of being...

Must I say more? Because there is more to say. So much more to say and I no longer want to hide it. I want to share it. I want to express it. I want to write it. I want to accept it. I want to protect myself from it. And I no longer want to believe that by not expressing it, I am protecting myself. Because it isn't true. At all. By not expressing it I am  just stuffing it deeper and deeper into my psyche...setting myself up to be surprised and shocked when it comes creeping back up, out of the shadows one again seeking control over my life.









I don't believe in shame. I believe in transparency. I believe that with openness and with expression, comes healing. I no longer want to hide myself away for the sake of my family. I want to express and to create boldly and I want to share, to connect and to heal through my art. Too many of us are hiding our traumas in the closet. I want to live with that closet door open. Wide open.

It takes courage and I have earned my own courage.

Atara