What if I’m wrong?
I was thrilled to hear the news of the Supreme Court extending same-sex marriage to everywhere in the U.S. I’ve become an ally even webmastering the OneWheaton website (OneWheaton is a group of LGBT people and allies that is trying to make a safe space for gays in the school and in Christendom in general). I don’t bother to tell my family about it because all but my little sister are not allies. But then I think (because I doubt therefore I am) what if I’m wrong. What if homosexuality is an abomination and I’m just damnning myself further and further into hell with my support of it. I guess you can never really shake the ghosts of your upbringing. It’s sad.
Internet Fame
One of my posts on disability and the church from Intercision got on Cindy’s blog, I guess it’s a prominent Christian blog. She even writes some for Sojourners and The Huffington Post. I found her through the OneWheaton. I’m grateful for the minor internet fame but wish the things I actually put work into got famous like my weather graph site. Back in 1999 I made a JavaScript engine that did all kinds of fancy search things (like letting you search by keyword reference [for example typing ebay Pokemon would search eBay for Pokemon products]). Firefox has that functionality now though you have to set up the engines manually. This engine also popped multiple windows for queries when you separated terms by comma. This was back before Google where people routinely searched many engines for things (because engines had different strengths). Also the engine I made had an ActiveDesktop component so you could dock it as a widget on your Windows 98 or 2000 computer. This search engine I made was never popular at all.
Tall Man or Slender Man (suicide spirit)
I am really far from Evangelical Christianity but still really appreciate this Billy Graham evangelistic video. Of particular interest to me was the part about the single mother who was thinking of suicide and someone in the church detected it, finding a “suicidal spirit”. The reason that piqued my attention is because of a New York Times article about a faceless spirit stalking Native Americans via web comics and dreams that tells people to kill themselves and has already pushed some (already extremely vulnerable) youths to take their own life. My theory now (assuming materialism turns out to be untrue) is people with already messed up lives and brains are more susceptible to the vagaries of the spirit world. Even in my own psychotic break I saw demons. The closest the Bible gets to a suicidal spirit is Mark 9:14-29 (though the conventional reading is epilepsy).
This applies to people on the spectrum because they are much more likely to have suicidal thoughts than the general population. Why this is I’m not sure, maybe the stress of making it in the world, isolation, a history and presence of ostracism, rejection by the church, etc..
You can help people who struggle with depression by doing these things
Practice common courtesy and hospitality. A lot of times little things aren’t actually little to those who are hyper sensitive (something people struggling with depression often exhibit). If someone struggling with depression does something good for you, thank them. This is a rare case where one has a ridiculously easy opportunity to authentically build another person’s self-esteem. Another common courtesy thing is to not ignore people’s communication. Someone struggling with depression will almost always interpret being ignored as a sign they aren’t worth engaging. Practice hospitality, taking in people even when you don’t want to. Quantity of time is often more important than trying to regiment quality time because quality time tends to bubble up extemporaneously in the quantity of time. A lot of people don’t open up until the second or third hour you’ve spent talking to them. This is especially true for males.
Be compassionate instead of dismissive of depressed people’s impaired interpretive skills. Our hyperindividualistic culture puts all the burden on those struggling with depression to play cognitive tricks to smoke and mirror themselves into thinking positively. Often the effort to think positive is counterproductive because the chemicals and situations are such that the positive thoughts fall flat like darts against a brick wall. Plausible deniability is at work a lot of the time (where you are in an ambiguous situation and have to choose to believe a positive or negative interpretation). One can tell the depressed person to believe the positive interpretation or one can find peace with their thinking. If you can offer cold hard evidence that an ambiguous situation is stacked in their favor, present it. But if you can’t don’t try to talk them out of their interpretation because it will just make them double down on the negative one.
If you are being used as a shield, put up with it. Many depressed people use people, not principles as a shield against the negativity inside and around them. This is abhorrent to the therapeutic-industrial complex which is every man (and women) for themselves. But emotionally weak people need emotionally strong people, and yes it is a relationship where they will be doing more taking than giving (something else the therapeutic-industrial complex tells you to avoid). But this is one of those cases where effort on the part of the emotionally strong person helping the depressed one will do wonders for the sum total of happiness in the world even if it decreases the strong person’s happiness.
Google Search Trick – No Ads!
If you don’t want to see advertising on a Google query simply add -nazi to it (minus sign next to nazi). This will obviously exclude searches that include the word nazi in them but in most searches you won’t need this (unless maybe you’re arguing with someone on the opposite side of the political divide as yourself). Also works on Bing!
I am not going to buy my next job
faith in God
is a vessel that holds hope in God
when it cracks
its contents dribble away
A telltale sign that a job offer isn’t legit is it’s asking you to pay them instead of them paying you. Christianity is similar to this in that the promise of hope, when people are pressed about it, becomes an imperative to hope. Of course people struggling with depression aren’t able to summon chemicals or cognitive tricks to bring hope, so now they are not only hopeless but guilted for not being hopeful!
Asking people to put forth effort (in this case having faith) when they are at their most vulnerable, weak, and hurt is unhelpful.
What is True?
There are a lot of people trying to make truth claims. The irony is the more they shove bullshit down your throat the more obvious the actual truth becomes.
Something is true if those in power are doing everything in their power to convince you that it’s false. Why do those of power and privilege encourage you to pray but discourage you from community organizing and collective bargaining. They know the former won’t harm them but the latter could.
If something’s true it comes into play at critical junctures such as a job interview or a date. Yes you can lie your way through either but the point is even in your lies you are showing them truth (because being able to put up a front is a valuable skill). If you have a disability it’s going to manifest itself the most acutely at these critical junctures and cost you the most dearly.
Things that are true have a heavy influence on the cadence of communication. As the status differential increased between me and my close friends they stopped returning my messages. They would never tell me directly that they no longer wanted to engage me because of my low status (plausible deniability!) but their actions and cadence showed what they really thought.
Things that are true are generally backed by empirical evidence. This should go without saying but some people think things shoved into your brain via force and conditioning are the most true (things like consumerism and religion). Society is extremely uncomfortable with people who think for themselves because they are harder to market to (70% of the economy revolves around consumer spending).
Things that are true are ugly or beautiful. According to the Greeks truth correlated with beauty. It is very difficult to come away from good art without finding some semi-objective standard of beauty (not that everyone agrees upon what is good art, just that lots of people cluster around different forms of good art). Things that are true can be incredibly ugly as well but it is important to realize that they capture you without being pushed on you.
Truth points to an objective system of morality. I’m starting to sound like Pat Robertson but there is a certain moral framework all of us can agree on. Forces reacting against organized religion may have muddled things but while lots of us recoil at the concept of sin we can largely agree on what is evil. Not to say all morality is absolute, a lot varies from culture to culture but we can all agree that slavery, killing, and torture is evil. Of course doing what’s right is always the hardest thing.
Disability Accommodations
A lot of disability accommodations (specifically for those on the spectrum) are seen by society as power grabs. This is largely because people with disabilities are generally on the bottom of the totem pole and thus expected to put up with crap. The problem with accommodations for those on the spectrum is often times they are things that the general population doesn’t like either but puts up with. A few examples.
Lighting that doesn’t drive one up the wall. I think everyone agrees florescent office lighting is not enjoyable. However for someone on the spectrum it can literally be torture. But giving someone an office with incandescent lighting is seen as a privilege reserved for those higher up. In fact the first office job I had my boss’s boss had an office with strictly incandescent lighting.
Tolerable noise levels. Being on the bottom often one gets the shit jobs. For example trying to get out of vacuuming because your sensitivity to noise is seen as manipulation. Even asking to turn the TV down is met with derision a lot of the time.
Advance notice. People on the spectrum cherish structure so if you know something that requires their action is just common courtesy to let them know as far an advance as possible. But this also is seen as a power grab because those lower in society are expected to be on call to those higher.
A medium of communication we are comfortable with. People (even good friends) won’t argue with me online about serious things. Yes it’s a medium I feel more empowered in then they do but that shouldn’t matter if their arguments are sound. I understand that different mediums are conducive for one forming different beliefs and identities (someone who lives offline will be formed differently than someone who lives mostly online). But this doesn’t mean there can’t be common ground.
You Get Better at It
One of the most profound things I heard about mental illness was from a Reddit comment. It was a thread about the “it gets better campaign” (the one for LGBT youth) and on this forum they were wondering if this also applied to mental illness. Someone commented in and said, “it doesn’t get better, you get better at it”. I have to agree. I appear better on the outside than I did years ago but that doesn’t mean I’m any better, I’m actually often worse. That’s why I was not happy when I lost my psychiatrist. The analogy I could come up with is an island ecosystem sinking into the sea. Over time 25% of the island gets lost to the rising sea but the inhabitants learn how to farm more efficiently on the land that remains so to the unaided eye they seem to be doing fine.
Alva Leigh and Samantha Farrell songs
Incredible cover of a folk classic
Something a little more jazzy for the change of seasons.