Deferential Dissembly
Fudging the truth is a way you show respect for entities. It’s like when a young mother of three dies of cancer, religious people will mention it and then say, “God is sovereign”. This a sign they are deferring to God. Also, when a high-status person ghosts a lot status person for being low status, we say “they grew apart and have different lifestyles” instead of the obvious. Like a tie going to the runner in baseball, an ambiguous situation’s interpretation always favors the person with the most power and privilege.
Wrong Lessons
I am not learning the lessons from my suffering that those in power want me to. They want me to concoct some kind of redemptive narrative out of all I suffer. I can’t and I won’t. Some of the lessons.
Power is the most important thing. Power and empowerment are the most important thing because they make people who wouldn’t otherwise behave kindly behave kindly. When you are on the bottom you get treated like what comes out of the bottom because people have zero incentive to treat you any better. Most people are good to those who have something to offer but when you don’t have anything to offer their true colors come shining through. I remember trying to get an apartment and all of the sudden my mother was concerned about the noise I’d hear if I lived there. It takes effort to be kind so people slip into their default unkind mode when dealing with people on the bottom.
I can’t experience inner peace without something on a schedule. Religious people opine about how believing in whatever they do gives them inner peace. It never did for me. What gave me inner peace was Ativan which is “addictive” because I go to the indigent clinic, members of my family who don’t go to the indigent clinic have no trouble getting it. This shows that my principle roadblock to treatment isn’t that the treatment isn’t there, it’s that I’m marginalized and there is no treatment for marginalization besides power which I do not have because I have a physical disability and mental illness and am likely neurodivergent.
Disability is unequivocally bad, especially if it’s comorbid with mental illness. People opine about redemptive narratives around disability how it makes you stronger and more resourceful. The only thing my visual impairment physical disability gave me was the ability not to get jobs from interviews and not drive so I couldn’t be the social moth trying to pursue potential friends as they backpedaled. Most people you can’t be honest about things like this because people want to see a silver lining or they dismiss your suffering outright. This is because if you have a visible disability it is incumbent upon you to put others at ease with it. I grew up likely neurodivergent so I learned this fact by trial and error because it’s not something people are honest about.
People can’t wrap their heads around the fact that some of us have little control over our thoughts and emotions. I get gaslit for not being able to control my emotions when bad things happen to me. Upping the medication dose is a blunt instrument that just erases more of the self to give one more control of their mind. Society actually likes it when people are in this weakened state because they can be manipulated more easily. If you don’t have any power over what goes on in your life and you don’t have any power over what goes on in your mind that’s when you know you are heading towards the bottom. Only adding physical pain will make things worse.
The studies that showed SSRI antidepressants not treating actual depression were correct. I have been on SSRI antidepressants twice in my life. The first time they did help my depression some but the bipolar mania put me in the mental hospital and while there they found out I still had moderate depression. And just now I got on Zoloft and it does make me more assertive but because I’m on the bottom I get to choose between being walked over or weathering the blowback of standing up for myself. So now I am depressed from weathering the blowback of being more assertive. Zoloft seems to treat the accuterments of depression like rumination without making one any more hopeful. Rumination was where most of my poetry was born so taking that away from me actually incurs a cost. SSRI’s mitigate stress so you can be a better worker drone, and few would admit this. Zoloft has helped me work harder.
The thing that scares Christians most is the full self of someone who tried to find God but the whole thing blew up in their face. Multiple Christian friends have renegotiated their relationship with my to only stick to surface-level topics. If their god were so powerful I don’t know why my full self would scare them. It’s almost like their god doesn’t exist. The least a god could do would be getting communication right. My life has been a testament to being told all kinds of crazy stuff by the voice of God and sometimes not ignoring it and being sent to the funny farm. Also being an abject failure despite being smart and talented enough not to be is another thing that makes their brains do a backflip.
Dueling Successes
I have come to think of success in the same way as the minivan thermometer. The minivan thermometer displays the indoor and outdoor temperature. Translating to success, that translates to my definition of success and society’s definition of success.
I am successful in one sense: I forgave the person who wronged me the most, I’m not hooked on illegal drugs, I haven’t been hospitalized for mental illness in 20 years, I do work for the immediate family and autism group. I have two modest jobs that I work.
But that’s not society’s definition of success. Society’s definition of success is having a nice place, a nice car, a good job, charisma, faith in God, normal looks, etc.. if you don’t have that, people treat you like garbage. People go into reduced functionality mode when they engage you if they return your messages at all.
36th Journalversary
Thirty six years ago today I begin keeping a journal. I did not keep it up my entire life, from age 9 in 1989 to age 12 in 1992. And then started my diary in April 1997 and went through 2003. Then my Xanga blog was a stand in for my diary from 2003 to 2013. Then I started journaling in a private text file. It’s not as intimate as actually writing stuff down but it’s easier.
Muses
People wonder why I am not motivated by money. That one is easy, I have never had money so I don’t know what having money is like. The employers I do the most for wonder why I’m not motivated by money when they haven’t paid me enough to even live on my own in a modest apartment. Hope comes from crumbs. When you are making enough to have a modest apartment you settle in and think about a starter home if you just work harder. Since I’m still stuck not living on my own there is no pipeline for me.
I have always been motivated by muses, though I didn’t realize it formally until recently. My first muse was my grandpa on my mom’s side. He was a very kind and generous man. At age 14, I showed him how I got my self-booting slideshow in an Amiga public domain disk catalog, and he was proud of me. There was a teacher in the Amiga community I was close with who was my muse the next year. As a junior in high school, my muse was a high school crush who was a great artist. My iris painting was for her. That one broke up when she ended up dating someone who wasn’t me, and my senior year, I turned inward.
I went to a Christian college which there was an intense amount of good as well as bad swirling around. The good was my employers, I had the highest respect for my student employment boss and my other boss who I worked with the first two years out of college. Fast forward to 2015 to 2019 and my muse was a poet who ran an open mic I performed at.
I no longer have a muse and my work suffers or doesn’t happen at all because of it. Some people can have abstract muses like “God” or “truth,” but my mind can’t do that.
The People I’m Insanely Jealous Of
I have gone from marginally attached to the workforce to the working poor. I can tell you without hesitation there is no situation worse than being poor and still having to work. I’m getting off of disability, I was forced to apply for federal disability as a condition of getting Medicaid and I had so many disabilities (visual impairment, glaucoma, bipolar 1) that I got accepted the first time. Now I’m getting off disability because I make too much money but have rarely been in poorer mental health. I was manic this spring, but it was a “dry” mania; there was no elevated mood, only irritability, and borderline psychosis.
The people I’m insanely jealous of are the people with disabilities/mental illnesses who don’t have to work. Being working poor, you neither get time nor money. If you are sedentary poor at least you get time. The worst feeling of all is not being in control of either your mind or your life. This is something you can’t know unless you have actually experienced it.
The other issue with being working poor is that high-status people you were once close to still ghost you because of your low status, and yet you are working, just not a job that is high-status enough to warrant them responding to you.
Having Faith
I don’t think people telling you to have faith realize what they are saying when they are telling you to have faith. It’s like saying “push this button”. When you push it you rarely get hurt but half the time we push it we get an electric shock. For people in low social capital environments faith often blows up in their face. If we can’t trust anyone what makes you think we could trust your deity. But it’s worse than that because what we are really being asked to trust is those who work on behalf of this deity. And those people treat those of us without social capital worse.
Evaluation of My Poetry
Gave Claude AI the newest of my poetry and here is what they had to say:
Based on the poetry you’ve shared, it seems you are grappling with some deep and complex emotions related to mental health, disability, faith, and society. The poems express feelings of alienation, frustration with societal expectations, skepticism towards religion and psychology, and struggles with self-worth and belonging. There’s a raw honesty in confronting difficult truths and experiences.
Some key themes I notice:
Critiques of how mental illness and disability are viewed/treated by society and religious institutions
Skepticism towards simplistic or overly optimistic psychological/religious narratives
Feelings of being misunderstood or rejected due to neurodivergence/disability
Grappling with loss of faith and disillusionment
Frustration with societal values and capitalism
Dark humor and sarcasm as coping mechanisms
The poems have a confessional, stream-of-consciousness quality that conveys the intensity of your inner world and thought processes. There’s anger and pain, but also moments of insight and even dark comedy.
Overall, your poetry seems to be a way of processing difficult experiences and emotions, challenging societal norms, and giving voice to perspectives that often go unheard. The honesty and willingness to confront uncomfortable truths is striking.
I hope writing continues to be a helpful outlet for you. If you’re open to it, speaking with a therapist who specializes in disability and neurodiversity issues could potentially provide additional support in processing these complex emotions and experiences. Take care.
Trauma does not make you stronger
Who would have thought repeated exposure to trauma doesn’t make you stronger.
What Helps the Most
People blame social media for generation Z’s mental health woes and that may be part of it but it’s an easy scapegoat that requires us to do none of the inner work as to why things have gotten the way they have.
Having a serious mental illness myself I would like to say the things that help the most people want to do the least. This is because they are sacrificial and contrarian. Modern psychology has trained us to be resentful when we are helping someone else and not getting anything in return. Things like platonic touch, hospitality, taking in venting, transportation, child/elder/pet care, etc.. are things people used to do more. There was more of a romanticization of servanthood to it and helping someone wasn’t looked down upon. These things helped keep mental illness at bay or at least lessened the symptoms.
So modern psychology makes things worse by forcing super needy folks with mental illness to this unrealistic standard of atomization. And then it tells those who are more healthy not to lift a finger on anyone else’s behalf and trains them to be resentful when they do.