labhells
some people are murdered by labels
but they still call it suicide
I try my hardest to hide the fact that I am bipolar. One reason is once people stick that label on you they project their prejudice of what they think a bipolar person is on you. You are written off.
Lesson: Getting at the Truth
Words and generalizations are a match made in heaven. You ask people a question like “does status really matter” and you will get the standard therapeutic B.S. The point is, almost like the doctor knee toy hammering test, people have an autonomous dissembling reflex. You need to beat this. The important point to learn is the truth bubbles up extemporaneously, almost like a Freudian slip, you generally can’t get an honest answer by trying to get at it directly.
When I went to a psychiatrist in Wisconsin they gave me a bipolar worksheet (because I was a bipolar). One of the worksheets was a checklist for looking for signs of mania. A lot of them were the typical fare, like were you happy for no reason, or did you think people could read your mind. There was one that I was particularly drawn to. It said, “I thought I could change the world”. Implying that, of course you can’t.
If the general is a person, the specific is an alien that bursts out of her chest (I didn’t see the Alien movies but that’s about all I know about them). I wanted to live on my own and asking wasn’t getting me anywhere so I found a specific place that was for rent. That forced my parents’ hand and they said I could not live on my own. I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting from people with regards to status really mattering. So I spent $8 to reserve a place at a Wheaton alumni gathering (I went to that school and it’s pretty selective so alumni are generally very vocationally successful). My parents wouldn’t give me a ride there because they knew how bad I would be treated (an ignored email from a former close friend from college who dropped out of my life because of low status portended to this).
The point is, the therapeutic-industrial complex has made finding the truth more difficult but you can beat it if you find creative ways to tease it out.
Also the therapeutic-industrial complex would tell me to give people the benefit of the doubt and not accuse them of ignoring me for being low status. This is on purpose. They are all about shielding people of power and privilege. The good old Calvinist depravity of man idea just doesn’t serve those in power well anymore.
dog whistle worth
Therapists tell their clients the have innate worth. This is another way to keep those on top on top and the rest of us down. Think of it. Those on top take the idea they have innate worth to heart and experience said truth in their environment. Those of us closer to the bottom are also primed to believe we have innate worth, but we go out into the world and spend a lifetime dealing with the blowback from a world that tells us the exact opposite. And dealing with this blowback immobilizes us.
axes of death
just because you haven’t killed me vertically
doesn’t mean you haven’t killed my horizontally
by treating me like i’m already dead
and then crying foul when i start believing it
There are two axes of death. The vertical is physiological death, from perfectly healthy to the heart stops beating. The horizontal is the death of a person that’s more psychological, social, and even spiritual. The most obvious example is deterioration due to a traumatic brain injury or Alzheimer’s. But parts of you destroyed by mental illness also qualify as horizontal death. And because so much of a person is made up of their social interactions/bonds, ostracism and scorn also aid in ones horizontal death.
There are laws protecting people from vertical death (even threats of vertical death) but no protection from horizontal death.
emotions ≠ circumstances
They have a term for sounds that don’t arise from real-life events. They call it schizophonia. For example someone talking in the next room wouldn’t be schizophonia but talking coming from the TV would be.
I feel the same thing happens with us where our emotions become divorced from our circumstances, but we don’t have a word for this. As my bipolar worsens I notice I’m in good and bad moods for no reason and times are good or bad based on emotional state rather than what is happening in front of me. For example I can be eating the best meal or lounging in a tropical paradise and I’ll still feel miserable sometimes. Conversely it can be the yuckiest winter day completely alone and I’ll feel great.
I think emotions divorced from circumstances is something that feeds on itself. People with depression often try to party, get drunk/high as a matter of escape. But this ensures that their highs and lows generally aren’t tied to their circumstances. And not feeling anything is often a bad thing so abusing substances becomes that much more enticing.
let’s talk about the weather
Two years ago we had a heat wave early March. This weather map above is from that heat wave. Below is a diagram of high temperatures (kind of like a tree ring) with the outermost years the latest. As you can see the March highs were in the eighties.
If you are using a non Internet Explorer browser or Internet Explorer 10 or above you can explore the weather mandala for yourself.
Trinity
One of the things I have been doing in the last ten years of my life is trying to visualize the Trinity. It has been a costly journey and I still do not have anything that nails it down, but I try.
There was also something here about the body and the blood (yellow like a Lego man and red) and fire (because of the color) and water (because of the semi transparency). And maybe even the sun at sunset.
Hey Ladies
I find it interesting that the gender balance for people of faith is skewed towards women. So if I were religious and spiritual and started evangelizing I would actually be helping the ladies because I’d be most likely be converting men, giving the ladies a bigger dating pool.
There is no love lost between religion and I but I like the idea of helping the ladies.
Social Independence
We are consummate individualists. But we consider people socially independent when the social interaction they (like everybody) depend upon comes on account of their merit. Someone without a disability holds down a job and the social interaction from said job (and the resulting relationships formed through it) help sustain them socially. The point is people are coming into this person’s life through sheer self-interest. Now someone with a disability who can’t get a job due to prejudice and other barriers doesn’t get this social interaction. So they’re effectively a shut-in. Engaging them is considered an act of altruism and done generally only by helping professionals. This person isn’t considered independent because it isn’t in others’ best interest to engage him socially. The point is “social independence” is a construct of society based on society’s opinion of you, nothing else.
time:
Time accrues. What you do when you are young is more important not just because those are your formative years but because those memories will live with you as long as you are alive. The earlier the memory the longer it lives with you (and influences subsequent memories). There is also the fact that you may need the people you knew when you were young when you are a lot older. There are lots of times in life as you get older where people are just not open for relationships. When you get in a situation where this is true you look back and wish you would have done better with the relationships you had in the past.