#it's the depression it's the healing from a perpetual survival state I know I know

[antisocialxconstruct]

vent that I don't feel like trying to fit into the tags gfdsgsdg

and NOT aimed at anyone in particular but rrrgfhgfhfdh I'm getting so so frustrated with the narrative of like "if you're a True Artist you feel this deep gnawing urge to Create™ and the only thing that's worse than making art is NOT making art"

like....... there's a version of that I guess is true?? obviously no one becomes an artist unless they have some innate desire to make something, but I don't know, it's just... I've had art block, or more like. art ambivalence? for over two years now and the messaging that REAL artists are constantly driven to create like it's some instinctive impulse.... stings. I have ideas, I have things I would like to see in the world somehow, but right now I just cannot find the motivation to actually put the work in. It's less "I have a driving desire to make art but not the time or energy," and more "I think hard about the things I'd like to do and it just doesn't sound worth the effort." And every time I see one of those takes it just sparks this little feeling in the back of my mind that I guess I'm just not enough of a true artist and I might as well just not bother anymore.

[supportyourmother-blog]

Vol 1.

I. 

In dedication to Marie Harrison, Hunters Point environmental activist, and all indigenous peoples lost, stolen, detained, migrating, creating, thriving, resisting, loving, and protecting Earth.

 II.

Our intention is to share the wisdom we have gained in this lifetime through popular education, decolonization, direct action, and our inherent willpower to heal ourselves, loved ones, relatives, and pachamama (Mother Earth) from all that we have been through and all that is to come.

 III.

We are living in the Anthropocene, a geological time period marked by the altering of Earth by human activity. In recent years we have seen record-setting storms, droughts, and fires around the world. The destruction of the environment and the exploitation of resources is directly linked to the rise of global fascism. It is reaching its peak and manifesting in exploitation, oppression, and the poisoning of people and the earth. Communities of color are most affected by climate change and environmental destruction from industry. Both biodiversity and cultural diversity are rapidly being homogenized. Climate change and resource wars are displacing people around the world and fueling massive waves of immigration. Our Black and Indigenous relatives are already living in this post-apocalyptic world after having been dispossessed by colonialism in the past and at this very moment. Our ancestors knew then and we know now that the end of one world means the beginning of a new one. How can we create a world worth living in? How can we ensure that it is one that the next seven generations can survive and thrive in?

This guide was made to help navigate the modern ecological crisis. When we speak of ecology, we include people, communities, and cultures along with plants, animals and the land. Human beings are animals that are part of nature; therefore, a part of ecosystems. This zine was created on stolen Ohlone land that has been colonized three times. We recognize colonialism as an on-going act of destruction of communities and the land. It is important that we let Black, Indigenous, and Queer, Trans and Two-Spirit people (BI-QTPOC) lead us in our work towards liberation. Indigenous people around the world have been at the frontlines of the war against colonialism and continue to be as we see with our relatives in the Amazonia, Africa, West Papua, Turtle Island, and First Nations tierras. Although science and technology offer some solutions to climate change, we must take the initiative to make changes in our own lives so that our children and grandchildren will inherit a livable planet. Technological fixes only perpetuate the capitalist system that has wreaked havoc on our planet. The only true solution to climate change is revolution. 

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” - Assata Shakur

 IV.

Indigenous Existence as Anti-Colonial, Anti-Fascist Resistance:

We’d like to acknowledge that global Indigenous communities have and continue to be the agents of cultivating and preserving “theory” and “analysis” when it comes to protecting the earth and do not see their existence as mutually exclusive from it.

 “We are not defending nature. We are nature defending itself!”

Image from solidarity action for Amazonia, via @mundano_sp on Instagram

  V.

Theories to help us understand our current situation and how to strategize:

Ecology is the study of the relationship between different organisms in an ecosystem. A fundamental aspect of ecology is the interconnectedness of all life. 

Ecofeminism recognizes the connection between the domination of nature and the domination of humans. 

Ecowomanism builds upon black feminism, ecofeminism, and environmentalism. Ecowomanism is based upon the intersectionality of oppression, including social injustices and ecological injustices. It challenges the whitewashing of environmentalism and acknowledges the contributions of women of African descent and women of color to the environmental movement. 

“Ecowomanism is discourse, dialogue, a conversation that centers the voices, experiences, and sociological perspectives of women of African descent and women of color on the environment.” – Rev. Dr. Melanie L. Harris

Indigenous Anarchism is malleable, embraces change, and explores what survivance looks like as remnants of genocide. Because it identifies colonialism as the root cause of the daunting state of things it does not seek to include coerced and collaborative worldviews. How do we manifest our ungovernable force of nature? This definition was crowdsourced at the Indigenous Anarchist Convergence in August 2019 occupied Dine territory.

Ecosocialism blends ecological and marxist theory. Ecosocialists believe that capitalism is the root of war, poverty and environmental destruction and that dismantling capitalism will help solve these issues. 

Geocommunism is a theory that has been developed by political geographer Arun Saldanha that argues that capitalism is the root of climate change and societal inequality. Geocommunism proposes a communist revolution rooted in intersectionality and ecological consciousness.

Excerpt from the geocommunist manifesto:

The Anthropocene has to be posited as the material and theoretical ground of any concept of social justice. The combat for justice starts with four facts: 1)resources are per definition finite, 2) the earth system has been irrevocably altered by human production, 3) positive feedback loops under capital are accelerating severe perturbations to ecosystems, 4) humans are in the last instance evolutionary entities at risk of starvation, disease and brutality. Scientists predicting half of humanity will perish by 2100 are already proposing fascist responses to these four facts.

https://sites.google.com/umn.edu/arunsaldanha/geocommunism

Social Ecology is the exploration of connections between people and the environment. Anarchist theorist Murray Bookchin analyzes the interdependence of social formations, institutions, and has radically inspired the emergence and sustenance of the Kurdish liberation movement.

  VI.

Solidarity looks like Anti-Colonial Direct Action:

Image description: Tuira Kayapó, has been fighting to protect the amazon in Brazil for decades from western multinational companies. She ran the blade of her machete three times over the President of Light holding Company Petrobras cheeks and in her native tongue warned, “You are a liar. We do not need electricity. Electricity is not going to give us our food. We need our rivers to flow freely: our future depends on it. We need our jungles for hunting and gathering. We do not need your dam.”

  VII.

Disaster Preparedness:

As climate change worsens, natural disasters will increase in severity and frequency. The Bay Area is long over do for a big Earthquake. The East Bay is particularly vulnerable to quakes because of Hayward fault. Although we cannot prevent natural disasters, we can prepare for them. Consider organizing with your neighborhood to create a disaster plan.

Basic Emergency Supply Kit

Water (1 gallon a day per person for at least 3 days)

Food (at least 3 day supply of non-perishable goods) *if you have pets keep an extra supply of pet food and if you have a baby keep extra supply of infant formula*

Flashlight and extra batteries

First aid kit

N95 Masks

Trash bags, plastic ties, and baby wipes for sanitation

Battery-powered radio / NOAA Weather Radio 

Medicines

Cash or traveler’s checks

Sleeping bag or warm blanket

Change of clothing and sturdy shoes

Matches (in waterproof container)

Personal hygiene products

Pens and paper

Important documents

Other Resources to help you prepare for disasters: 

https://www.earthquakecountry.org/sevensteps

https://www.ready.gov/wildfires

NASA map of active fires

  IIX.

Environmental Trauma and Grief:

There is so much pain on Earth. Emotional responses like grief, sadness, anger, depression, anxiety, and dissociation are all normal responses to all the trauma on Earth. Give yourself space to mourn the state of Earth. Honor these feelings, but also try to transmute pain into action. These feelings may very well fuel our revolution. 

 We must fight and care for the living.

  IX.

Herb & Fungi Support:

tulsi / holy basil / albahaca / Ocimum tenuiflorum

Tulsi is a sacred plant in traditional Indian and African medicine. The plant is an adaptogen which means that it can help they body respond to stress. The plant can help you restore balance in your body. It can also aid digestion. It can be made into a tea or taken as a tincture. 

ashwagandha / Withania sonifera 

Ashwagandha is a plant from India and North Africa. It is a calming adaptogen that can help with insomnia and anxiety. ¼ to a ½ teaspoon can be warmed up with milk and some honey. 

reishi / lingzhi / Ganoderma lucidum

Reishi is a mushroom traditionally used in China and Japan. It can help with anxiety, support the immune system, and has anti-inflammatory properties. You can add reishi powder to smoothies or take pills or a tincture.

lemon balm / melissa / Melissa officinalis 

Lemon balm is a plant in the mint family that is native to North Africa, West Asia and Southern Europe. The plant can be used to uplift the spirits, reduce stress and anxiety. It can also help with insomnia, nausea, menstrual cramps and headaches. It can be made into a tea, tincture, or put into a salad.

mullein / jupiter’s staff /  Verbascum

Mullein is a plant in the snapdragon family that is native to Europe and Asia. It is a powerful herb for respiratory support. It has anti-inflammatory and antiviral properties. It can be made into a tea or taken as a tincture.

elderberry / tapiro / Sambucus nigra / Sambucus mexicana

Elderberry trees grow from what is now called Oregon to Baja. It can be found in many parks and gardens in the east bay. It usually grows by rivers. The berries can be made into a syrup or tincture that is good for immunity and can replace cold or flu medicine. The flowers can also be made into a calming tea. 

 Elderberry syrup recipe:

3 cups water

1/2 cup black elderberries (dried, or 1 1/3 cups fresh)

2 TBSP ginger (grated)

1 tsp cinnamon

orange peel

1 cup honey

Heat water, elderberries, ginger, cinnamon, and orange peel. Simmer for 45-60 minutes. Mix in honey and then place into jars.  

  X.

Top 10 Polluting Corporations:

Coca-Cola (Dasani, Topo Chico, PowerAde)

PepsiCo (Mountain Dew, Lays, Gatorade, 7Up, Doritos, Cheetos, AquaFina, Quaker)

Nestlé (Gerber, Perrier, S. Pelligrino, Coffee Mate,  Häagen-Dazs, Fancy Feast, Purina)

Danone (Oikos, Activa, Silk, Horizon Organics, So Delicious Dairy Free)

Mondelez International (Oreo, Trident, Sour Patch Kids, Ritz, Toblerone, Chips Ahoy)

Procter & Gamble 

Unilever (Breyers, Dove, Lipton, Pure Leaf, Ben & Jerry’s, Jif, Vaseline)

Perfetti van Melle

Mars Incorporated

Colgate-Palmolive

https://www.breakfreefromplastic.org/globalbrandauditreport2018

 The biggest Polluter on the planet is the United States Military.

The United States Military has caused many environmental and health catastrophes. All the nuclear testing and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the use of chemical weapons in Vietnam and Cuba, have poisoned the people and land all over the world. This state sponsored violence begins here at home from native reservations to sacrifice zones in low income, black and brown neighborhoods. Our indigenous relatives here on Turtle Island throw down against pipelines, tar sands, uranium and coal mining on their land for water, the right to exist, survival. Here in the bay area there are several neighborhoods that are contaminated from naval bases like Treasure Island and Hunters Point that are still toxic. It is people of color and poor people that are most likely to live in these areas, be exposed to the toxins, and develop deadly diseases as a result of this ongoing violation and genocide.  

XI.

Common Toxins

Many products contain toxic substances that can cause you harm. These toxins eventually leak into the environment which then causes ecological damage. Unfortunately, many chemicals are already in our waterways and soil. You can test your water and soil to see what toxins are in there. Look out for these common toxins and try to switch to alternatives.

Search Engine for Body Safety Database: https://www.ewg.org/skindeep/

 DIY cleaning products 

All-purpose cleaner:

Put a mixture of one part water with one part vinegar into a spray bottle. You can also add a few drops of essential oils like lemon, rosemary, lavender, or place a sprig of lavender or rosemary in the bottle. 

 Kitchen cleaner and deodorizer:

Add 4 tablespoons of baking soda to 1 quart of water then pour mixture onto sponge or rag. 

 Glass Cleaner:

Add 2 cups of water, ½ cup of white or apple cider vinegar, ¼ cup of rubbing alcohol, and 1 or 2 drops of an essential oil for scent. Pour into a spray bottle and wet a paper towel or cloth before wiping mirror or window. 

 Houseplants that purify the air:

Snake Plant / Lengua de Suegra

Bamboo Palm

Aloe Vera 

Boston Fern

Peace Lily (toxic to cats)

Ficus / Weeping Fig

Dracaena

Spider Plant 

 Plants that purify soil (phytoremediation)

Mustard greens 

Sunflowers

Willow trees

Pumpkins

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-08-11/using-plants-to-clean-contaminated-soil/

XII.

Things you can do (Sustainability Guide):

Reparations.

Support indigenous resistance movements and projects

Support environmental organizations led by BI-QTPOC 

Study and undermine colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. Without an understanding of these systems of domination as the root causes to climate Armageddon and the oppression of black, indigenous, and brown people- none of the suggestions after this will aid the wound that is generations old.

Educate yourself on local and international environmental issues

Limit driving and flying 

Eat less animal products and other high impact foods like almonds, cashews, quinoa, palm oil

Eat seasonal and local vegetables and fruits

Limit use of toxic products 

Limit use of single-use plastic products(carry reusable containers and utensils)

Buy second hand

Pick up trash and recycle 

 Suggested Reading: 

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown

Anarchist ecology zine

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer 

Soil Not Oil by Vandana Shiva

Radical Ecology by Carolyn Merchant

Suggested films:

Secret life of plants 

The eyes of the rainbow 

 Bay area resources and organizations:

Sogorea Te’ Land Trust

Planting Justice

Movement Generation 

Idle No More

Communities For a Better Environment

Mask Oakland

 Bay area Farms:

Gill Tract (Sogorea Te’ Land Trust)

Spiral Gardens (Berkeley)

Planting Justice (East Oakland)

Soul Flower Farm (El Sobrante)

XIII.

From our radical, dreamy, anti-colonial imaginaire of a mother, Octavia Butler we leave you with an Earthseed verse from the Book of the Living…

“Kindness eases change, love quiets fear

And a sweet and powerful obsession blunts pain

Diverts rage and engages us in the greatest

The most intense of our chosen struggles”

We have a duty to ourselves, our relatives, and the earth. To abandon any of this is to abandon all those and that which makes us possible here now. Heal up, rise up, find your crew and act up..the time is up.

Contributors:

Fiona

Ji

Sarita

*If you would like to contribute to this guide, please email us at symearth@gmail.com 

[dementor1112]

my mother isn’t cancelled at least, i don’t think so

I can’t stop thinking about the first person to ever put radium into paint, imagining the years they might have spent in the lab, fiddling with chemicals, years in university and apprenticeship leading up to the culmination of a career, an invention that would become a household name, that would light up the dials on the planes that won the great war. I imagine their horror as the first stories came out, as cases went to trial and the newspapers wrote about young girls rotting from the inside out, the jaws falling out of their skulls, the realization that this was their life’s work: that all they’d built was poison. I’ve been thinking a lot about the young soldiers sent into war, kids that boarded their planes to the desert genuinely believing that they were liberating a people and precipitating a future of peace and democracy; I think about them realizing, having broken their minds and bodies for the cause, that the fruits of their labor would be chaos and terror and the disintegration of state after state, that they were means to the deaths of millions. Most of all, I’ve been thinking about my mother, about what haunts and consumes her, and the absolution that I wish I could provide but I cant.

I don’t want to talk about my childhood. I don’t want to talk about the things that made up the first decade and a half of my life, and I don’t think I need to. The details don’t matter. The story is universal, of the trauma that your family can cause you, or maybe it isn’t universal and it just feels that way. The story is about your immigrant parents, your families of color, and if not quite universal it’s something familiar enough to be immediately recognizable, for the shared dark jokes, the shared therapy-speak, the shared impossibility of reconciling all that our parents did for us with all that they did to us. But that’s not the story: the story is about being twenty four and learning how to love your family in a way that’s true to yourself.

I think there’s a journey a lot of us take: you love your family and you’re afraid of them, you love your family but you’re angry, you love your family but you slowly realize that what you had wasn’t just how things were and wasn’t normal. You love your family, but you start to slowly realize the extent to which it all affected you, the ways in which it warped you, you love your family but you discover again and again how much of the things inside your head that cause you pain, the things you do that you hate yourself for, the impulses and fears you can’t explain can all be traced back to them. You resent your family. To be able to heal, you allow yourself to be angry, to be told with clarity that it wasn’t your fault, that what you experienced was real; that your pain and trauma are is valid. You love your family, but you need distance to set and splint everything. And then you’re older and then you’re the age your parents were when they had you, and then your parents reveal themselves as broken battered adults with whom you feel a sense of kinship. You learn to love your family again, in a whole new way, or maybe you don’t. A lot of the time you don’t. I was lucky, I suppose. A lot of us never get to hear our parents own up to their mistakes or see them try to atone for their actions. I don’t want to pass up the chance at healing that offered us, for her sake and for mine.

My mother didn’t believe in psychiatry until I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and not for a while after. Mental illness is hereditary: she’s never seen a doctor and she’s never been diagnosed, but while I was trying to explain my illness to her I told her about what it was like to feel great crashing waves of despair that sucked the air out of my lungs, and as I detailed my thoughts she told me that hey, everyone gets those thoughts, don’t they? She was a high school dropout who married young, and remarried, and had us, and poured all of herself into us and perhaps didn’t know how. I don’t know if she had to fight the same mental horrors that I did, or if she had any help. I don’t want to justify the things she did wrong. I can’t justify them. I can’t reconcile the unambiguous way I’d feel about anyone else I’d heard did the same things to their children, and the way my own feelings toward her are all a set of storm-cloud grays. I don’t know whether it’s because we share the same blood, or whether I’d feel the same empathy for anyone else once I’d known and seen as much of their stories.

On the phone one night with swirling snow outside and the cold sinking into my bones I called my mother because I missed her and I told her things were hard. I don’t usually say this: when you’ve been living with your depression for all your life, saying “I’m alright” when someone asks you how you’re doing is a reflex. Either you really are fine, and in those moments you want to laugh at the question- obviously I’m fine, everything is great!- or you don’t want people to worry. But that night the darkness felt perched at the top of my bed, a senselessly cruel figure that felt as eternal as a god, waiting to take my hand and lead me to death. You know things are bad when you can feel him- whenever it manifests, I’ve always thought of it as a “him”, faceless but solid enough to feel the air move against my skin. The mainstream Islam my mother practices considers suicide forbidden, a route to eternal damnation. I can only see it as a very real possibility as to how my life will end. I hope it doesn’t end that way, but hoping is the best I can do. I didn’t tell her all this. All I could say was that things were hard. But our family had never talked much about our internal lives, and that’s made us good at guesswork.

There were a few seconds of silence and then she burst into sobs. She wished she could just hug me, she said, and that my illness had been such a worry since I’d first told them. She told me that she prayed every day that God would take away my pain and that I’d get better. She’d walked outside to talk to me. She was living with my grandmother- her mother, a once-indomitable woman who survived Churchill’s famine and was known to friends and neighbors as the iron lady, now trembling and frail- who had cancer that had spread through her body and settled in her lungs, a hospice worker that told herself she was a nurse. She couldn’t cry indoors because her mom would worry and she’d been putting up a cheerful front for weeks, and it left her drained. Please don’t die, she begged, please please please, whatever happens, dying like that is a mortal sin and I can’t lose you forever, I can’t lose you in this life and the next and never see you again. You can’t break my heart like that, whatever you do, whatever happens, I can’t lose my son forever.

She regrets how she treated us when we were kids. She tells me this every time we talk and she asks for forgiveness, from me and from God. She told me that she constantly fantasized about finding some kind of time machine, about going back in time and changing things, doing anything anything to spare us, that she wondered everyday if she would have been better to have given us up and entrusted us to someone else altogether. I tell her that I know what it’s like to have hurt people, and to have lived with the knowledge of having hurt people. I don’t wish that on her, and I tell her as much. I don’t want any more pain in our lives. I don’t want the destruction in our pasts continue to perpetuate itself. I don’t want her to suffer, I want her to be happy, I want her to have the life she’s dreamed of having.

When I first told my parents about my mental illness it was shortly after my first time being hospitalized. The pain that led me there was still fresh and for the first time in my life it didn’t feel like pain I deserved. It was pain I could rightfully be angry about. And I was. You know hell, from scripture?, I told them. I lived that, I couldn’t imagine anything worse, I spent days curled up in bed telling myself that hell couldn’t be worse than this, and you’re partially responsible. I wanted them to own up to it and I wanted them to take some kind of responsibility. She shut down completely. She knew she lost her temper at us but every example I brought up made her go white. I couldn’t have hurt you like that, she’d sat on the bed and repeated, I couldn’t have done that, I couldn’t have done that, I couldn’t have done that. At the time it made me angrier at her. Just take responsibility! I’d snapped at her. I just want that! Just take responsibility!

It feels clear now that she was in shock and denial, that she was processing the narrative of her life shifting suddenly under her feet. When I think about trauma that passes itself down generations, all that I feel a sense of loss and waste and destruction. My mother sacrificed so much, gave up so much of herself, all for something that ultimately turned out to have caused immeasurable damage. It’s a painful and existential loss, the feeling that your life’s work went to waste, that all you built were ruins. Every generation we dream about giving our children a life better than our own and too often we realize that all we’ve done is continue that cycle, that the result of decades of their lives was all suffering. It’s how I imagine the lives of the chemists that created radium paint after reading about the radium girls, the first scientists to synthesize thalidomide as reports of deformed babies made the newspapers. It’s why I can’t stop thinking about them. Every time I see parents in the news that had their children die as a result of their mistakes, it’s how I imagine them: haunted, fantasizing about finding some kind of time machine.

Regret doesn’t work retroactively. Nothing will ever make me whole the way I could have been. I don’t want to excuse my mother, just to understand her, and forgive her, and make my peace with her presence. I want to be kind to her and to myself. I want the cycle of pain to stop.

My mother already had three children by the time she was my age. I know that I, the person I am right now, wouldn’t be able to look after one child, let alone three. I know that for a fact. So how could I expect her to know what she was doing? If I woke up tomorrow with kids, I don’t believe that I would have caused them the same kind of harm or subjected them to the same violence, but I also know I wouldn’t have devoted myself to them, or spent as much time on them, or given up my life and my career and the things I wanted for them.

I know that, and I could choose that. Did she have the same choice? Growing up in a small conservative town in the 1990s where people were expected to start their families in their early twenties, with limited options available to her, how much of a choice did she really have? I knew so little about the world at twenty-one, the age she had me, let alone at nineteen, when my oldest sibling was born. I know so little about the world even right now. Could she really have had any idea what she was getting into? Did she find herself, one day, trapped in a reality that she didn’t really know how to cope with?

I can’t cancel my parents.

I can never figure this one out. I believe my parents deserve forgiveness for damage on a scale that I don’t think I would give similar grace to for anyone else, including myself.

Calling accountability to our changing norms “call-out culture” has always felt disingenuous to me, a way to negatively frame collective social repudiation of actions that cause harm to others. It made sense to me that it ultimately makes the world a better place. It felt clean and logical. But love is the quantum unit where the clean convictions of morality break down. When I’m this close none of it makes any sense anymore. Grace for my family isn’t consistent anymore — my family is no more human than anyone else, so how could I possibly argue that my parents are uniquely deserving of absolution?

I can never figure this one out. How can I possibly develop a consistent sense of who or what deserves redemption? Would I be able to tell myself that they deserved redemption if they’d been anyone else, if I’d only known of the things they did to someone else instead of living through it myself? Would I have described that as giving them a pass for their actions? I probably would have. Why does giving someone a pass feel right, then, when it coexists with the empathy you have for those you know and love?

Does love and loyalty blind people from dealing fairly with loved ones who deserve more censure? Or does knowing someone deeply and personally create the empathy that makes you see their remorse as suffering, that makes you weigh their remorse as pain, that makes you weigh their pain against the pain they caused others, and makes you believe they deserve to be redeemed, that they’ve earned some kind of redemption? My parents aren’t more human than anyone else. My parents aren’t unique in having rich inner lives, being full of contradictions, having consciences. My parents aren’t unique in feeling guilt or remorse for irreversible harm.

Is there a point at which empathy tells us that the pain of their remorse and their attempts at change can be considered sufficiently redeeming, that they deserve good things again? Or is it all apologism, some kind of Stockholm Syndrome where knowing and caring about someone makes you willing to give them grace that they don’t deserve? Do people earn grace? Is remorse a form of pain we should empathize with, or should we consider it just desserts, worthy of no particular sympathy? Should the empathy I feel for the real pain I can see my parents feeling as remorse translate to other humans, who have done wrong and are making an effort to change and are remorseful? Everyone I love is no more or no less human than anyone else. The same morality should apply.

I can never figure this out: is it individual? Do only I get to forgive or not forgive someone who caused me serious harm? Should the outside world forgive them because I have, or would that be giving them a pass that they don’t deserve as long as the ruins that they made of me continue to walk the earth? Do even I have any right to give them absolution when I’m not the only one they’ve hurt — they hurt my siblings too, and if I could ever forgive them for myself, can I possibly justify being an outsider and giving them that absolution? Is there even any kind of standard? I don’t know. But it feels like a very important question that may have no real answers, and being close to it, both loving the people who hurt someone and being the subject of their harm, makes it much harder and messier than the abstraction of acquaintances or public figures. I stay up nights trying to find an answer. I’ve never been able to figure it out.

In my first semester of grad school, I told her I was struggling more than I had in a while and that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to manage this, that it was hard being alone, in a new country, with nobody I knew around me, how I felt like I just wasn’t cut out for this, that I never would be. We didn’t usually talk much about our feelings but I was struggling, and I think she could hear it in the dull, stumbling monotone of my voice. And she told me about how, when my family had first moved into a new country, back when I was still a teenager, that she was convinced she’d never be able to drive, that she felt like she just wasn’t cut out for it, that people who were able to drive just had something she didn’t. Years later, my sister had a terrifying encounter on a night out, and that very day she just sat down with the book, learnt everything, and she ended up passing her driving test. She became such a confident driver that even your father was impressed, she said.

She told me that she believed that if you wanted something enough, God would put in a favor for you, that a lot of the time she felt that she had some kind of godmother looking out for her. We don’t have godmothers where we grew up so when she said this she meant a fairy godmother, like in the Disney movies she’d watched with us on repeat when we were children. She’d learnt every single word to Hercules because as a toddler I loved it so much we watched it every day. She told me later that she’d gotten sick of Hercules. She did it anyway.

Ever since she was a child, she told me, she’d always dreamed of having a house of her own, where she wouldn’t have to share a roof with her extended family. Something out of the magazines. She got to have that house when we moved to Singapore and she threw herself into it with abandon- that house was my baby, she said. She met a contractor that she became friends with in a cab, where he moonlighted as a driver, and he helped her to renovate on a budget. That was her godmother, she said. She told me that, in the years after I’d left the country for college, she’d had to move out suddenly, and that somehow, miraculously, she found a place in the same building complex that was available to move into immediately. She told me she’d been talking to my dad about selling the house- her baby!- to pay for me to go to college, before she could even move in. I got the e-mail confirming a full-ride scholarship the next week. She got to have things that felt impossible when so many times things felt like they might fall through. She believed that grad school would be the same for me: no matter how impossible it felt, God would help and I’d get there.

But even with all that she feels that her parenting ledger is indelibly in the red, and I think she needs to know she’s not irredeemable. She tells me that she prayed constantly for her quick temper to ease, to not fly off the handle, and she hopes I’m proud of how now, no matter what happens, she never gets angry. She tells me a friend cheated her out of half her savings, and she didn’t feel any anger. She hoped he’d do something good for himself with the money and she’s thankful for the life she has. She’s religious, so she believes in some form of karma: whatever happens to her is God’s will, and life is a test. Misfortune is atonement. Anger would be failing the tests of her commitment to atonement.

I hate seeing her hurting. I hate hearing the haunted feeling in her voice. At moments it feels like inflicting hurt upon others is some original sin. Like some Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, the story of our family is predestined, and we are doomed to repeat ourselves over and over, and something tied into the fabric of our souls ensures that good intentions eventually devolve into inflicting pain. I was angry and said things that still haunt her. I don’t know if any real good that came out of my anger is worth having crystallized an existential crisis that consumes her every day. I don’t know how to live with having caused that kind of pain, and so I understand. I don’t wish that on her. I don’t wish that on either of us.

I try to comfort her. I remind her that at the end of the day, she did raise two pretty decent kids, both with college degrees. She tells me that if a measure of how well you raised your kids was how they treated the people around them, she must have done something right. I see her looking after her own mother, giving up any dreams she had to move back in to look after her, and I wanted her to know how much I admired that kind of self-sacrifice. I don’t tell her that I admire her strength in choosing to watch her mother die just to make her final months better, that I didn’t think I would have the strength to do the same. My grandmother is in her late eighties and my mother is only forty-five. I don’t want to think about it. I hope I don’t have to.

She tells me, and herself, that she thinks she did spend time playing with her kids, doing fun things with us, taking us on vacations and trying to spend time with us, and that was something. As she spoke, she kept hedging herself, telling me every other sentence that she wasn’t trying to avoid responsibility by saying this. It breaks my heart to see my words having become part of her own self-talk. In the final reckoning, she says, she doesn’t know if any of it mattered when she’d caused so much pain. I wanted to tell her that I felt her remorse and that I didn’t want punishment, that I loved her, but our family had always been so bad with emotions that I couldn’t verbally say “i love you, mom” on the phone, much as we both needed it. But healing is trying. Sometime after we hung up I texted her an I heart u emoji.

My parents moved to a bigger, wealthier country when we were children. Their parents moved from the country to the city before they were born. I’m here now, one step further, the first of our family to make the move to the west, inheriting the hope that any children I have will get to grow up in a place where they’ll have better lives than me, three generations living out our own versions of the immigrant dream, of struggles and sacrifices that our children would first take for granted then grow to understand.

When I was younger I thought that I would never have children, that I’d never risk my unresolved demons fucking up an innocent child. Now that I’m older, I’m more hopeful that the trauma we’ve had inflicted on us and in turn inflicted on others, generation after generation, would become something soft and gentle and beautiful. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put in the amount of effort and sacrifice and myself into my children that my mother did, but I’m hopeful that my children will never feel fear, that they’ll get to make mistakes, that they’ll be at ease with me. I’m hopeful that, as I try to build a childhood for them in a family that expresses their emotions, that talks about their lives, that tell each other they love them without hesitation, hearts more open than I ever have, that I’ll learn to be those things too.

[not-a-luxury]

Signs that I’m healing keep popping up! And I have always been- my self in a constant blessed bedraggled indignant hopeful beautiful wretched pure state of self-repair.

A couple of signs are: being able to overcome nausea from shrooms when it threw me for a ride a year ago, when shrooms sunk me into a deep dark depression a year ago- reflecting a completely different reality

And one more that made me pick up my phone, download tumblr and type this entry out.

Back home I was stuck in perpetual survival mode. Screaming and clinging just to stay where I was. I was getting better I think, gaining power but also just not there yet. I am cycling through past selves. Old me’s- from american high school, singapore secondary school and then junior college- that last one was where i was feeling stuck the whole last year. I felt her hovering, moping, I enjoyed her presence and her yearning and dark tendrils, reliving her stress and isolation and the unbearable routines that kept her going, the lost opportunities and strangled imagination that kept her from pursuing collegiate art, from doing anything sustained but a sport she only enjoyed for its short skirted uniform. Her yearning to fit in, and the I’ll fitting persona she wore- quiet desperation that was not so quiet. The hunger. I really empathize with her. Sweet child. 10 years ago. I am not you, I am you but you are an echo. I have grown around your bones. I have healed and tended to and aggressively defended what was deeply and utterly broken.

I feel more whole than I have in 10 years. That last shroom trip a year ago shook me to my core, it put me off psychedelics for so long. It saved me- from running away from my problems yet again, to a different city, uprooting everything, for the blind pursuit of something that would’ve set me back to the bottom of a ladder, to be unnecessarily vulnerable to the wrong people and institutions. Instead, I am here and better for it.

I haven’t seen her, heard her, walked backwards in her skin for a while. Don’t remember the last time. Yes I feel her aches from time to time - what if I had studied art then? But perhaps I wasn’t ready, perhaps this was all meant to be. I long to paint and create sprawling, vulnerable, living, squelching pieces of art. Maybe I’ll get there someday. Maybe my longings, my dreams will change. I love being in museums because my heart simply sings out.

Oh, to hold onto what makes my heart sing. What is the in between? How can I hold onto that feeling when I’m not painting for that large mirage-future exhibition? To be enough for today. The person I am today.

I am so, so fucking proud of the person im becoming, have become, have always been, will always be. I think that started when I was 22. You wonderful darling thing, thank you.

Another thought that’s been on my mind is this demonic-poison-ivy/languid-but-deadly-water-spirit dual persona. With a mix of ghostly girl. This embrace of darkness. This unrepentant streak of sitting back and not pandering, not a single iota, of not giving undue praise or undeserved meanness- yes that too. The ambivalence and ruthlessness must be precisely aimed.

I feel it in my bones- I am enough, enough. I am. That’s it. I am a manifestation of nature- hungry and full of needs and desires and light and dark and love. I’m not sure about hate- does a tree hate how it’s been split apart by lightning, fated to grow in two directions for for the rest of its life? I don’t think so, I think it loves the earth, loves the microbes, loves the sunshine and the birds that nest in it, loves the heat that flakes its bark. It does not hate the whine of the chainsaw but parts- knowing that it cannot be ended by so trite a thing. That it will continue on in all the things it influenced and sheltered and loved. And yet the tree does not make it easy for the saw.

Oh, to be ever thickening my trunk.

I love her, my college self, I tuck her away inside me- instead of letting her draw me inside her, i pat the seat beside me. Instead of envy- for certain parts of her, and exasperation and regret for others, I say- this is our second chance. We are getting there.

We can do anything we want. We can be led.

And so I’m opening myself up in spirit- to the greater Love that is running the show. Love has always been running the show, my source of self repair, the connective tissue that runs through me and beyond me and before me and that will never end. The most previous thing. Lead me, all of me’s. Languid spirits and demonic girls and college burnouts and failed artist and glimmering dreamer.

Of all my selves I choose you, my previous self today. Attention as the most previous currency. Attention as love. Here we are. No more looking back. Present. Loved. Whole. Enough. Being.

[perfectirishgifts]

“We Are Uncomfortable Being Uncomfortable”: Grieving During Covid-19

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/we-are-uncomfortable-being-uncomfortable-grieving-during-covid-19/

“We Are Uncomfortable Being Uncomfortable”: Grieving During Covid-19

Grief, often labeled as a “bad feeling” that we try to hide, is really just another part of the … [] human experience.

One of the things you might have noticed about our coping with the pandemic has been the Instagram-ification of it all. Sugar coated images that say: “Let’s bake bread and find ways to make the pandemic cute” or “Look, I am on my Peloton, I am doing self-care so well” fill our social media feeds, as if Covid-19 did not just surpass heart disease as the number one killer of people in the United States. They do this, perhaps, because it is easier to do something and try to cope, then to worry or to grieve. In fact, if we stop and admit what this experience actually is for all of us, it might be too hard to say out loud or really, to feel.

Nora McInerny, author of It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying is Cool Too), creator of the Hot Young Widows Club, and host of the award-winning podcast “Terrible, Thanks for Asking,” explains, “Right away, everyone wanted [the pandemic] to be something that it wasn’t. My social media feed was like, ‘this is how we’re making it fun and cute for us’ and like, I’m sorry, do you think our grandparents were like, ‘this is how I’m making this depression, cute?’ No. They were like ‘we are in a depression we have not eaten, you know, for several days.’” She explains that she once complimented a photo of her grandmother and while her grandmother thanked her for what she said, she also acknowledged that she was skinny in the photo because they did not have food at the time. Nora adds, “Our grandparents weren’t trying to life hack their way through a depression like, ‘here’s how I make content’.”

But, as Americans during Covid-19, especially for those with privilege, there is a desire to experience only those emotions deemed acceptable and good. As Nora puts it, “It is very rare that someone’s like ‘I don’t like that lady, she’s too happy’…No, No, No. People are like ‘I don’t like that woman she’s sad, she’s angry, it’s like get over it.’ ”  Nora feels we, as a culture, have few acceptable emotions and grief isn’t one of them. We even like to pretend, as she points out highlighting our best selling book selections, that we can choose our attitudes and just “be happy.” She says, “It’s like, what if it were that easy?” We even try to look on the bright side of the more painful things in life like cancer diagnoses (Nora points to a book called Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich for more on this topic). News Flash: It doesn’t work.

Instead, Nora wonders what it would be like if we actually admitted the truth and said out loud that right now, during this pandemic, this is scary and no one knows what they are doing. We may all hate being uncomfortable, and feel like we should be using this time for some kind of self-growth, optimization, and even improvement, but, our actual goal, she says, is just to survive, and remain stable. She adds, however, that she does not want to negate people’s coping mechanisms, or judge them. She simply wants to highlight that while coping like this makes sense and she knows why people do it, it is often just a “a perpetual gaslight extravaganza.” She offers to remind people, “this does suck,” as often as they need it.

And, she is right, it does suck. Studies estimate that for every Covid-19 death, a person leaves behind 9 family members bereaved. This means about 2 million people in this country will be grieving in 2020 and this number will only grow. Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider, an internal medicine physician and the founder of End Well which is hosting a free, virtual event called Take 10 on December 10th featuring celebrities and everyday heroes on this very topic explains, “The pandemic has created a collective grief experience that we have not yet addressed as a nation (or as a world). I’m not sure we even have the right words to describe what it is that we’re going through. In order for us to move through this experience and find a place of healing, we need to address this, normalize the sadness and the pain that so many are feeling and create ways to support each other.” 

One way, of course, is to name it and say out loud what we are feeling and not sugar coat it at all. Another is to understand what grief is and when we are experiencing it, and then, normalize it and learn how to help someone through it. For additional information and for a community on these topics, you can also register for free for Take 10 and hear Nora, as well as Andy Cohen, Taraji P Henson, Blair Underwood, Maria Shriver, Soledad O’Brien, Justin Baldoni, Biden Covid-19 Advisory Board member, Dr. Atul Gawande and many others speak virtually on December 10th.

Grief Is Not Just Death

Nora McInerny is a reluctant grief expert who co-founded the Hot Young Widows Club, an online … [] support group for an endlessly growing group of people around the world who have lost, what she calls, their person.

Nora, who in 2014 lost her second baby to miscarriage, her father to cancer, and her husband, Aaron, to a brain tumor within six weeks, says that when she first felt grief herself, she assumed it was something else. She says, “You will assume that you are just ungrateful, you will assume that you are somehow defective, that you’re not grateful enough for what you do have, if you are somehow experiencing the loss of what you no longer have.” But, in a way, she notes, grief is really not something that you understand until it happens to you. Even then it makes people, including those you admire, become “a bunch of amateurs.” With grief, she explains, “We will all be absolutely new to it, every time we experience it.” 

This is especially true as you can grieve much more than death. Nora notes that she always believed that grief could only occur with death and didn’t extend much outside of the funeral, when she thought the emotion ceased to exist. When someone told her that she was grieving her husband’s brain cancer, she became angry. She felt like calling those experiences and feelings “grief,” somehow cancelled out all of the positive emotions she was still having with him while he was alive. She says, “It felt like grief was a huge blotter that just sort of, I don’t know, stamped out every other feeling, instead of something that coexists with every other part of your life. I was absolutely grieving when Aaron was diagnosed, was grieving for our entire marriage as I watched him, you know, suffer, and I watched him slip away, as I watched our friends and our family live the lives that we assumed that we would also get to live. That is also grief.” 

In the pandemic, loss of in-person school or graduation or other milestones like bat mitzvahs or weddings, can also be grief. Nora explains that with her four children (4, 7, 14, 19), they are all grieving different things, like the fact that they left school and didn’t return without warning. But, even if we want to draw comparisons between our situations or play “who has it worse,” there is no “worse” or “more important” grief. For example, you can grieve not returning to school and that doesn’t mean you are saying it is worse than her husband dying. Nora feels no good conversations include the words just, only, but, or should, and that you can feel anything about your own situation, without immediately comparing it to someone else’s.

She adds, “It is like the Grinchiness of American emotionlessness to say, well there’s just only so much sadness to go around and it got all sucked up, so there’s no sadness left for, you know, my seven year old who moved to a new city and doesn’t get to go to school and make friends. Yeah, there is. And if you imagine everybody is a seven year old, you wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t do it to yourself [and] you wouldn’t do it to other people.” 

Grief Has No Right Way Or No Timeline

There is also not a right or wrong way to grieve and everyone experiences it differently. Nora highlights that this is true even if everyone is living through the same thing, like a global pandemic. When her husband died, she was grieving the way she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him in it, while his mom was grieving the loss of her only son, his sister, her only brother, and their son, his only biological father. She also didn’t realize she was lucky to have had a funeral or time at the bedside until Covid-19 made restrictions to the mourning process and she has heard what that has been like for people. She says, “I wanted to isolate and I did a pretty good job of it, but I did not appreciate how optional it was for me and for some people (whom she has met in her Covid-19 specific group in the Hot Young Widows Club) it is not optional and that is just absolutely wrenching.”

Grief also has no timeline. Just because you want to stop feeling sad or want your friend or family member to “move on” doesn’t mean they can or should. Dr. Ungerleider explains, “If we can get away from the idea that grief is a linear, step-wise process —we may better understand the fact we can’t speed it up and “get over” it quickly. Grief is often something that lives with us forever and ebbs and flows throughout life.” Nora tells a story of how someone in her Club wrote in a post, “When my son died, people said call at any time, I’m here for you, that was 7 months ago. I called 10 people tonight and it went to voicemail.” Nora points out that if people are fatigued of hearing about someone’s son dying after 7 months, that is heartbreaking as that is really no time at all.

In fact, she still grieves Aaron even though she is happily remarried and it was just his 6-year death anniversary. Still, she had to even remind her own family to reach out on the day of. She previously would have felt like they just didn’t care or she was messed up for not being “over it” by now, but, she now thinks differently. She also knows that people aren’t often malicious and they just assume that their experience of grief must be someone else’s. For example, her family had left her alone because they thought it would make her sad to talk about Aaron as it makes them sad to talk about their Dad. But, grief and how you want to cope with it just isn’t the same for everyone.

So, How Do We Help Each Other Grieve? 

It can be really hard to know what to say or how to say it when someone is suffering or grieving, especially a death. Dr. Ungerleider says that even though physical in person connection has been removed, we can “still show up for each other in other ways and listen and ‘be there’ for each other.” We may really want to fix everything, which Nora has seen too, but, Dr. Ungerleider points out that we need to get comfortable sitting with someone who is grieving and recognizing that we can’t solve their problem. Nora adds, “If you can say to your friend, ‘I don’t know what you need, but I’m going to be here. I’m going to mess up, [and] you can tell me to fuck off and it’s okay.” That is what can help someone through it. She adds, “empathy is just having a good imagination.”

Full coverage and live updates on the Coronavirus

From Healthcare in Perfectirishgifts

[daxfarroh]

Chapter 3

“Ah, Rey. Thank you for joining me.”

Rey nearly laughed at the hilarity of this greeting, issued by the most magnificent woman in the galaxy. She would join General Leia Organa anywhere—in the fiercest of battles and in imminent death. Surely, she would meet her in this cramped corner of the Falcon for lunch.

“I’m sure you’re wondering what I’ve been doing here in my little office, all shut in for the past week,” Leia said, gesturing at a rather intimidating mess of maps and data pads. She sat down heavily with a cup of milk tea and a plate of rehydrated bread Rey had brought her. “Please, sit. Have some tea. Or something stronger—I don’t mind. God knows you probably need it.”

Rey collected her own cup of steaming tea from the galley just a few feet away and took a seat as Leia studied her with a furrowed brow. She looked horribly tired.

“I’m afraid I’ve neglected you, Rey. I know you must feel very alone.”

It was true that the just the thought of being so close to Leia every waking hour was one of the few pleasures of being packed into this ship with a dozen other souls, and it was true that Rey had seen much less of her than she’d hoped. When she wasn’t alone in her “office,” pacing back and forth, making calls and hovering over a holomap, her time was consumed with grave questions from Poe and others, asking about rations and plans and whether or not they were doomed.

“But I promise you you’re not alone,” Leia said now, placing a soft hand over Rey’s. “You are of great importance to the cause, Rey, and to me. I will train you as best I can—as soon as there is time. I can help you read the texts and make sense of all that dribble drabble.”

She winked and Rey grinned. Those texts had been nothing but a massive headache thus far. “I would like that very much. But I know your work here is more important.”

“Well, I can’t argue with that,” Leia responded, slumping a little in her seat to stare at her lap momentarily. “I’m afraid saving the Resistance has come down to food, water and a place to rest. We need to lick our wounds for a while. But once those needs are met, when we get a bit of time, we will rebuild. I’m sure of it.”

“I am, too,” Rey said. “Do you have a plan?”

“’Plan’ is a strong word.” Leia rose to her feet and turned on the holomap, summoning before them a hovering planet of swirling earthen colors. “I would call it a ‘proposal’—a proposal for charity which I’m going to make to an old friend. Have you ever been to Ryloth?”

Rey shook her head.

“Of course you haven’t, I’m sorry. My old brain,” Leia palmed her forehead in embarrassment. She then returned her attention to the spinning globe, moving her hand over it wistfully.

“Ryloth is a beautiful planet in the Outer Rim, inhabited by a fierce, freedom-loving race called the Twi’lek. On Ryloth, there are supporters of the Resistance, as many fear the First Order will soon cast its eye on them. And, on Ryloth, there is an abandoned shipyard from the Old Empire—one that still houses at least one viable battleship. But most importantly, my friend Yendor lives there. He’s retired and old, like me, but still respected in government. And he owes me a favor. … I believe he’s good for it, though I’ll admit it’s a longshot.”

“And if he can’t help us?” Rey asked.

“Well, then at least we’ll have a place to lay low for a few days and get our bearings. I don’t think B--,” she stopped herself, drawing a sharp breath. “I don’t think the First Order will come looking for us there. At least not for a while.”

A pang struck Rey as she wondered if she should share what she had learned last night. She was terrified to tell anyone about the Bond, but she wasn’t sure she could keep anything from Leia.  

“I could use some fresh air and a break from this tin can, couldn’t you?” Leia patted the rust-stained wall of the Falcon as if it were a living creature. “No offense,” she told the ship, her eyes wandering its dusty corners, seeing ghosts that Rey could not. “You know, I can feel him so clearly here. I keep catching myself outside the cockpit door, expecting to find him and Chewie inside, arguing. He sure did love flying this rusty bucket under the radar, where even I couldn’t find him. … Is it wrong to be jealous of a ship?”

Rey, all but speechless at this moment of intimacy, struggled to hold the stately woman’s raw gaze without betraying the chills that were overtaking her. “I miss him, too,” was all she could think to say.

“He is with Luke, in the Light.”

Leia sat down again, opposite Rey. For the first time, Rey saw the weight of age on her. It was the heaviest she’d ever seen, as if this woman was a thousand years old and had suffered the loss of a thousand loves. But, in truth, she had, Rey realized. Perhaps no one alive had witnessed more death. Now, here on this ship, who did she have? What planet did she call home? Leia Organa was, in fact, the loneliest person in the galaxy. And yet, still, she maintained this aura of purpose, of perpetual fortitude. What for? Rey wondered. How does she breathe, let alone lead us to yet another redemption?

“I’ll be joining them soon.”

The words wrenched Rey out of her own thoughts. “What? What do you mean?”

Leia sighed, taking time to choose her words and muster her token half smile that always padded the worst of news.

“Rey, after I was blasted out of the ship, I haven’t exactly been feeling my best.”

“I’m sure you haven’t. That was terrible. But you’re getting better. You’ve been getting stronger ever since, though I’m sure the food here isn’t doing you any favors,” Rey was spewing out sentences, delaying whatever was about to be said, because she knew she did not want to hear it. “But you’re doing better—”

“Rey,” Leia stopped her gently, taking her hand once more. “Perhaps twenty years ago I could have come out without a scratch, but let’s face it: I’m no spring chicken. The doctors told me, when I woke up, that my time is limited.”

“How limited?” Rey snatched her hand away, feeling cold. “How much time do you have left?”

Leia sighed again and, for once, appeared unsure, as if she was weighing all the consequences of telling her. After what felt like an eternity, she made her decision.

“Weeks. Maybe months, if I’m lucky.”

It was as if the Force was holding Rey in her seat, squeezing its ruthless fingers around her lungs and making her head spin. No, this wasn’t computing. This couldn’t be right. Not Leia. She was immortal.

“Rey?”

Suddenly, Rey’s senses flooded back to her all at once and the blood rushed to her legs, compelling her to leap to her feet and run from Leia without any explanation. When she returned, she was holding an ancient, leatherbound book the size of her own torso.

“I can’t really read it, but I’ve been studying some healing practices.” She opened the book to the marked page and pointed at the strange text. “If you help me, I can probably heal you.”

A smile lit up Leia’s face—the proudest, fondest smile Rey had ever received—but it didn’t reach the general’s sad eyes.

“I’m aware of the Jedi healing practices and, unfortunately, you can’t fix being old. Someday soon, you’ll be able to mend a bone with just a touch, but you can’t fix the damage I’ve endured. So many years of damage, Rey. So much living and suffering. It’s been one hell of a life, and I’m going to make sure I don’t waste a second of it.”

Leia smiled again as a tear slid down Rey’s cheek. There wasn’t a dry eye between them, but Leia had more to discuss.

“Enough of this depressing stuff. Let’s talk about the future.”

“The future?”

“Mhmm. You, my dear, are going to play a very important role in it. Are you ready?”  Rey nodded, though she was not ready for any kind of future without Leia.

“As you might have guessed, Poe is my heir apparent in this. I think we both know that it doesn’t really matter who I choose—it will be Poe just the same.”

Rey’s mouth formed a watery smirk at the thought of Poe, as she had recently come to know him. She liked to think of him as a friend. Their comradery had been immediate upon introduction. He liked calling her his “torture buddy,” since they had both survived an interrogation from Kylo Ren. Yet she also knew him to be a pilot who would fly through a sun if it got in his way. And he didn’t care much for taking orders.

“Poe has the potential to be a great leader,” Leia continued. “He takes leaps that others would consider suicide, which is how I’ve gotten this far. And he’s a bit insane. Which is why you must be his guiding light.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You are not only, well, you, Rey, but you are also the last Jedi. You represent all who came before you and carry all of them with you. When I am gone, my soul, too, will live on inside you, because mine is the soul of a Jedi. When Poe goes astray, you must bring him back, as I would. Do you think you can do that?”

Without hesitation, because it was Leia who was asking her, Rey replied, “Yes.”

“Good. Now, call me Master Leia.”

[ashwinder-venom-blog]

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The content of this blog may OFFEND members of various demographic groups, including but not limited to:

Trolls, orcs, goblins, demons, angels, fairies, spirits, deities, gargoyles, gnomes, werewolves, vampires, zombies, robots, androids, cyborgs, elves, hobbits, giants, dwarves, humans, other primates, felids, canids, other mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, worms, molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms, cnidarians, sponges, bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, minerals....

....men, women, intersex people, agender people, transgenders, cisgenders, heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals, demisexuals, asexuals, sadomasochists, furries, otherkin, fictionkin, aliens, natives, white people, brown people, Europeans, Africans, Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Asians, Middle Easterners, Hispanics....

....conservatives, liberals, moderates, libertarians, progresssives, industrialists, globalists, colonialists, fascists, socialists, capitalists, gardeners, farmers, ranchers, pet owners, false environmentalists, anthropocentrists, humanists, transhumanists, biohackers, transcendentalists, atheists, rationalists, agnostics....

....Christians, Jews, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, Shintoists, Taoists, Heathens, Wiccans, Satanists, Scientologists, scientific researchers, computer programmers, office workers, medical professionals, religious leaders, false prophets, paranormal skeptics, paranormal investigators, government officials, military personnel, police officers, social justice warriors....

....feminists, civil rights activists, eugenicists, terrorists, vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, paleo dieters, pet owners, pregnant people, infertile people, parents, oocytes, spermatocytes, embryos, infants, children, adolescents, adults, elders, baby boomers, millennials, college graduates, or high school dropouts....

....As well as anyone who has been vaccinated, fluoridated, fumigated, irradiated, intoxicated by alcohol, circumcised as an infant, artificially inseminated, fertilized in vitro, sexually assaulted, born with a chromosomal defect, diagnosed with a chronic illness, or prescribed prescription medication.

Could you make it through all that without puking, panicking, punching a wall, or popping a pill? Good. I don’t mean to offend, but it’s so hard not to these day, and I want to make sure I’m being inclusive enough. Patience and compassion are virtues I’m still working on, so please bear with me. What I share could save your life or limb some day.

Who am I? For starters, I’m a very private and security-minded person. I like to remain as anonymous as possible while still appearing as an individual. With the dangers of identity theft, cyber-terrorism, electronic surveillance, and preteen hackers, I suggest you aspire for anonymity as well. Keep it simple and vague like me.

Bisexual cisgender young adult female, childfree unmarried housewife, mostly white European heritage, living in the central United States of America. Been labelled nerd, geek, emo, goth, punk, hippie, rebel, freak, bipolar, autistic, narcissistic, antisocial, uneducated, genius, witch, doctor, rewilder, primitivist, prepper, survivalist....Take your pick.

I have a strong passion for....a lot of things. So many hobbies, interests, miscellaneous areas of expertise, etc....I could prattle on endlessly about the utterly irrelevant. But what is most relevant to YOU? I’ve already failed to keep it short and sweet, but I’ll try again anyway.

My passion for biology should really sum it up. Although that usually isn’t good enough for most people, not without expressing just how hot that passion burns. Geobiology, deep ecology, biochemistry, botany, herbalism, zoology, anatomy, psychology, anthropology....I’ve studied it all more in-depth than you could ever dream of.

Supplemented heavily by astrophysics, metaphysics, theology, history, archaeology, and bushcraft, of course. For well over a decade, ever since preschool, I’ve felt a mysterious drive to study all these things. Why? Well that’s the mystery! But I suppose I should use my knowledge to help people.

I’m a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer. I walk everywhere, squat to pee, eat wild plants and meat, build simple shelters to sleep in, crawl and climb through the woods, and don’t drink alcohol or use any manmade medication, Do I suggest you live the same way? Yes. That’s how humans evolved to live, not as an overpopulated petrochemical-eating virus. We are animals.

Sure it sounds like a dirty, bloody, painful, difficult life. It can be at times, but so can modern “western” life. Are terrorist attacks, hate crimes, environmental pollution, and disease outbreaks not dirty or painful? If the human population was smaller again, just another animal in the ecosystem, we wouldn’t have those problems. Think about it.

Mammals with brains our size can socially track 50-150 individuals. Extended family and close friends. Healthy well-fed hunter-gatherer bands have usually numbered in that range, with 25-200 miles of forest or savanna between communities. A far cry from the cities and highways of today.

Why is there racism, sexism, starvation, sickness? Because our personal territory is being invaded! Human life is considered so valuable, more than the trees and bees we rely on, and every measure is taken to preserve human life and promote population growth. But the quality of all life has been lost.

When a human suffers an injury or illness that silences their heart, they are resuscitated, drugged, butchered, and often left disabled or disfigured anyway. If an athlete breaks his neck and stops breathing, if a child receives a 3rd degree burn over 75% of her body, they should be led peacefully into a merciful death. Not kept alive in misery for the corporations and politicians to continue cultivating the masses for their own profit.

Likewise, infertile people are aided in conception. Disadvantageous genes that would otherwise die out are then perpetuated in the population. The resulting children often have a higher rate of preterm birth and congenital abnormality, entering this life requiring drugs or surgery as newborns. Helpless babies being butchered, just because their parents needed someone to love.

Many mental illnesses are also affected by genetics, including susceptibility to suicidal ideation. If you are dissatisfied with your personal life, depressed by the state of the world, or simply curious about the afterlife, you have no right to die. Your body is owned by the government, and it is a crime to vandalize government property. The pharmaceutical corporations that fund their campaigns make a lot of money from psychotropic medications.

Children are raised as livestock, all to turn a profit. We’re all livestock. Thanks to human overpopulation, dozens of other species go extinct each day, but still we suffer the most from our own mistakes. No other animal struggles so much with disease. If there were less humans, sure there would be less of us, but there would be so much more for everyone!

Without providing the infertile a chance to have triplets through in vitro fertilization, there might be less congenital birth defects and less overpopulation overall. A smaller population, thus more isolated communities, limits the spread of infectious disease. And less humans but more nature means more natural resources.

Like clean water, space to move around, and fresh food that isn’t loaded with dyes or preservatives. You know, all those basic human needs we wage wars for. Yes, politics and religion might be part of it too, but violence is mostly science. Psychology. Biology. Our food, water, and space is being threatened by human overpopulation, so we have the inexplicable urge to kill each other off. As we should.

Our global ecosystem, the biosphere, is imbalanced and infected. By us. Like us. Earth is running a fever and shaking with the chills, fighting the virus that is our species. We can either go with the flow of Mother Nature, or we can continue trying to fight her. But this is a war we cannot win, because if the trees and bees die, so do we. They feed us with the breath of life.

Demcocrats, Republicans, everyone between and beyond....Folks of all creed, color, sex, gender, ethnicity, and/or philosophy....You are ALL being LIED to! The hatred you feel toward each other is sorely misplaced and misunderstood. Women against men, black against white, liberals against conservatives, youths against elders....You are ALL wrong!

More government-mandated social programs are NOT the answer. Neither LED lightbulbs, nuclear energy, vegetarianism, nor flying to Mars will save this society or this planet. We’ve been running toward the edge of a cliff for several thousand years, and we may or may not have jumped to our deaths within the past decade. It is time to “get back to basics”.

Humanity did fine for hundreds of thousands of years as just another animal in the food web, even millions if you count all the Homos before us Sapiens. And Earth did fine without us for BILLIONS of years. Learn to live as our ancient Paleolithic ancestors did, how to build, hunt, forage, cook, pee, and sleep like the cavemen. Heal and protect yourself and your family like we all know you can.

In a nutshell, this blog will contain wilderness survival tips, natural health hints, fun facts about science and history, as well as sociopolitical commentary. There might also be occasional references to the liberal arts, mostly pre-2000 music, psychoactive herb use, and erotica/porn. I have a major hurt/comfort fetish, like a shamanic Florence Nightingale, and the medical experience to back it up. TRIGGER WARNING!

[thewrosper]

Psychological Impact of Lockdown & Conflict on Kashmiri Children

Armed conflict in Kashmir has a detrimental effect on all the inhabitants of the valley but children, undoubtedly, fall in the most vulnerable category. Some of the immediate targets in the life of a child who is exposed to an environment of conflict are the health aspects, which are, in my opinion, the most significant ones for a child to develop into a productive adult. Firstly, and at the physical level, the health of our kids is crippled by the armed conflict; with over 300 children killed merely since 2003, thousands maimed forever and numerous blinded. The pattern clearly shows how children were direct targets of state violence, as part of its stated offensive to curb the uprising in the state.Secondly, if by chance the child survives, he is inflicted by those silent, torturous weapons! Yes! I am talking about the silent, but excruciating mental scars. With each passing day, the conflict in Kashmir is developing negatively from bad to worse and excessive use of armed forces, torture and of course injustice are the factors to blame. Children, being young and unaware, have been and remain one of the worst affected social groups in the ongoing conflict. While adults are busy surviving, schools and playgrounds that were supposed to be the places for children to play, are damaged and more often than not, taken over by the forces. Another aspect is that in a state afflicted with conflict, child rights are violated on a massive scale and it passes as “almost normal.” Thousands of children in Kashmir are affected and that too, beyond any healing. At a tender age, they are confronted with physical harm, violence, danger, fear and loss. At the time when they were supposed to learn the first Kalimas, they learn the Dua’as of Maghfira. When they were supposed to play with toy guns, they witness real guns that have killed their families before they could know them. Paranoia grips their tender psyche and just when they reach a barely teen age, they are forced to rebel. It’s a vicious circle of exploitation. The impact of the ongoing conflict on Kashmiri children has received a little or, let’s say, no attention so far. While parents want and try their best to provide a safe and secure atmosphere for their children to grow up in, unfortunately, in Kashmir, they have to bury the hatchet of wanting to see their children flourish.Thousands of Kashmiri children have already lost their childhood to the turmoil and the violence. And with each bullet and each tear gas shellfire,the number only keeps mounting. George Orwell once said “War is peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is strength.” That is precisely what is happening in Kashmir. The effects of war are so severe that over the years it has affected generations of children so harshly, twisted their thought process, their emotional and psychological capabilities so severely, that this troubled state of oppression and war crimes has become the new normal for our young ones.The conflict has mentally disabled generations of children and young people beyond any repair for the rest of their lives. The consequences are endless, but to name a few, hundreds, even thousands of children are exposed to high levels of stress which results in disorders such as Hysteria, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Acute Stress Reactions, Anxiety, Psychosis and Depression. Coping strategies, unfortunately, are not many. And children forced to grow up before they earlier had to, render to substance abuse to calm their senses down superficially or even choosing a more lethal path- that of armed rebellion. Again, a never ending circle that only has one end- Death. I believe that Kashmiri children suffer from direct alterations in their personalities, identities and behaviors every day. Each gun shot fired brings them a step closer to PTSD. Each banging on the door increases their count of nightmares. Each window pane broken shatters their idea of living in a peaceful society. Each night protest makes their insomnia more severe, each security raid, each dead body witnessed sinks their mental health further.If we examine, our children, barely after their toddling age, have “HUM KYA CHAHTAY? AZAADI!” on the tip of their tongues. Bring me one single child from the valley who doesn’t have the slogan memorized and I’ll be damned! Even though our children don’t know the actual meaning of what they are saying, yet, they imitate what is reverberating from each nook and corner. Initially, in imitation, a child, barely in his pre-teens, would simply go out and join the crowd and say, “Everyone is on the street and pelting stones, even my friends are doing the same, thus, I did the same.” What maybe enjoyed as a light day of a strike call and happily accepted absence from school, used up in throwing stones for fun, or at times, to even release the young fury in their tender minds, is actually a price heavily paid to the boiling pot of conflict in disguise. We are sacrificing both our, and the peace of mind of our children, sacrificing our jobs, our earning, the education of our children. We are, moreover, sacrificing our lives. Our children might not have inherited our culture or our religion, but they sure have inherited the conflict. In their minds, the songs of freedom are playing, as you read these words, on loop. However, contrary to what one might assume, the songs are filled with tunes, rather, blasts of gunshots and hues of blood. One similar song reverberates in my mind as I’m writing this… “IN SPRING THE FLOWERS BLOOM; OURS DIE.” The children of this Paradise on earth feel cramped, shut in a hovel, and imprisoned in their own minds wherein insolent doubts and fears make up the bars of the prison. Lastly, I would once again say that our children are facing the brunt of this conflict. They have lost their childhood, their innocence, their hopes and even their ability to dream. Worse is, they will continue to be victimized until an unanimous and peaceful resolution is not passed to settle the Kashmir issue down. Now, let’s approach the idea of what can be done. I know many of us bring the facts to the surface but most of us don’t actually do much afterwards. The solving of the conflict is long term. What can be done immediately? That’s precisely the question we are working upon. JKCCS (Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society) has advocated for human rights in Jammu and Kashmir for nearly two decades. Its area of concern covers the whole conflict. Right from arbitrary detentions to ceasefire line killing to take encounters and so on. As a coalition of civil rights groups, Its work is to speak truth to power and confront the State and its violence. It believes in collective unity and our aims of making the Valley of Jammu and Kashmir a better place for the people residing here, striving hard to work towards providing all the internationally guaranteed civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights including the right to self-determination remains our basic agenda. As far as the children of the valley are concerned, JKCCS recently released a report titled “Terrorized: Impact of Violence on the Children of Jammu and Kashmir”. The report is the assessment of the violence against children in Jammu and Kashmir in the last fifteen years i.e. (2003 to 2017) and gives data on killings, arrests, mass violence, sexual violence perpetrated against children. The report provides statistics, graphs, figures, and the analysis of killings of children in the last fifteen years (2003 to 2017) in various incidents of violence in Jammu and Kashmir. The report lays bare that there are no legal and normative processes or practices protecting children’s rights in Jammu and Kashmir as hundreds of minors have been booked under the repressive Public Safety Act (PSA), with total disregard to the fact of their being children. We do understand that children are the building blocks of our society and they need to have a childhood of peace and tranquility. Not one spent under the shadow of guns and grenades. We need scaled-up responses to improve psycho-social well being of our young ones before further generations. I would conclude this with a quote, Benjamin Sáenz once said, ‘The heart can get really cold if all you’ve known is winter.’ The conflict has set somber clouds of grief over our skies and it doesn’t look like either us, our children will witness spring anytime soon, but the least we could do is to stop our hearts from freezing and becoming indifferent to the suffering of our own people and get united against these perpetual war crimes and child abuses. We need to do our service to our state. A long overdue, service. As I conclude this, I hear the noise of security helicopters hovering in the night sky above me. Patrolling for us? Patrolling us? No one really knows. Author studies Law and is a founding member of MASHEK, an NGO for the children of conflict. Article written by Ovais Karni. He can be contacted on Twitter @OvaisKarni This is an independent opinion article. The Wrosper is not responsible for the content of the article. Read the full article

[airoasis]

My son was a Columbine shooter. This is my story | Sue Klebold

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/my-son-was-a-columbine-shooter-this-is-my-story-sue-klebold-2/

My son was a Columbine shooter. This is my story | Sue Klebold

The last time I heard my son’s voice was once when he walked out the front door on his strategy to college. He referred to as out one word in the darkness: "Bye." It was once April 20, 1999. Later that morning, at Columbine excessive university, my son Dylan and his buddy Eric killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 others earlier than taking their possess lives. 13 innocent humans were killed, leaving their cherished ones in a state of grief and trauma. Others sustained injuries, some resulting in disfigurement and everlasting disability. However the enormity of the tragedy can’t be measured simplest by means of the quantity of deaths and injuries that took situation. There isn’t any option to quantify the psychological injury of those who were within the tuition, or who took part in rescue or cleanup efforts. There isn’t a strategy to investigate the magnitude of a tragedy like Columbine, primarily when it may be a blueprint for different shooters who go on to commit atrocities of their own.Columbine was a tidal wave, and when the crash ended, it would take years for the community and for society to appreciate its have an impact on. It has taken me years to try to receive my son’s legacy. The merciless habits that defined the end of his life confirmed me that he was once a fully one-of-a-kind man or woman from the one I knew. Afterwards persons requested, "How would you not recognize? What style of a mother have been you?" I still ask myself those same questions. Before the shootings, I suggestion of myself as a just right mother. Serving to my youngsters end up caring, healthful, in charge adults was once the fundamental position of my lifestyles. However the tragedy convinced me that I failed as a mum or dad, and it’s partly this experience of failure that brings me here at present.Aside from his father, I was once the one character who knew and adored Dylan essentially the most. If anybody would have known what used to be taking place, it will have to were me, correct? But I did not be aware of. In these days, i am right here to share the expertise of what it’s like to be the mum of anybody who kills and hurts. For years after the tragedy, I combed via recollections, attempting to figure out exactly the place I failed as a guardian. However there aren’t any easy answers. I can’t provide you with any solutions. All i can do is share what i have learned. After I talk to persons who did not comprehend me before the shootings, i have three challenges to satisfy. First, when I stroll right into a room like this, I in no way be aware of if anybody there has skilled loss seeing that of what my son did. I consider a must renowned the struggling caused by a member of my household who is not right here to do it for himself.So first, with all of my coronary heart, i am sorry if my son has precipitated you ache. The 2d task i’ve is that I have to ask for figuring out and even compassion once I speak about my son’s death as a suicide. Two years earlier than he died, he wrote on a piece of paper in a notebook that he was slicing himself. He stated that he was in ache and wanted to get a gun so he would end his life.I failed to know about any of this until months after his demise. Once I speak about his demise as a suicide, i’m not looking to downplay the viciousness he confirmed on the end of his lifestyles. I’m looking to appreciate how his suicidal thinking led to homicide. After quite a few studying and speaking with authorities, i have come to feel that his involvement in the shootings was once rooted now not in his want to kill but in his desire to die. The 1/3 project i’ve when I speak about my son’s homicide-suicide is that i’m speaking about mental health — excuse me — is that i am speakme about intellectual wellness, or mind well being, as I prefer to call it, because it is more concrete.And in the same breath, i am talking about violence. The last factor I wish to do is to make contributions to the misconception that already exists around mental illness. Only an extraordinarily small percentage of individuals who have a intellectual ailment are violent towards different folks, but of those who die through suicide, it’s estimated that about seventy five to probably greater than ninety percent have a diagnosable mental wellbeing situation of some form. As you all comprehend very good, our intellectual well being care procedure is just not organized to support every body, and now not everybody with damaging ideas suits the criteria for a distinct prognosis. Many who’ve ongoing emotions of fear or anger or hopelessness are under no circumstances assessed or handled. Too most likely, they get our attention only if they attain a behavioral quandary. If estimates are correct that about one to 2 percent of all suicides includes the murder of another person, when suicide charges upward push, as they’re rising for some populations, the homicide-suicide rates will rise as well.I desired to appreciate what was once happening in Dylan’s mind prior to his death, so I regarded for answers from other survivors of suicide loss. I did research and volunteered to help with fund-raising activities, and at any time when I would, I talked with folks who had survived their own suicidal obstacle or try. One of the vital worthy conversations I had used to be with a coworker who overheard me speaking to anyone else in my place of business cubicle. She heard me say that Dylan would now not have adored me if he might do anything as horrible as he did. Later, when she determined me on my own, she apologized for overhearing that dialog, but informed me that I used to be flawed. She said that once she was once a younger, single mom with three babies, she grew to become severely depressed and was hospitalized to preserve her reliable. On the time, she used to be distinct that her kids could be better off if she died, so she had made a plan to finish her existence. She assured me that a mom’s love was once the strongest bond in the world, and that she cherished her kids greater than anything on this planet, but seeing that of her ailment, she was once definite that they would be better off without her.What she mentioned and what I’ve discovered from others is that we don’t make the so-called decision or option to die by means of suicide in the equal method that we choose what vehicle to force or the place to head on a Saturday night time. When any one is in an extremely suicidal state, they’re in a stage 4 clinical wellbeing emergency. Their pondering is impaired and they’ve lost entry to tools of self-governance. Although they are able to make a plan and act with logic, their sense of actuality is distorted by using a filter of agony via which they interpret their fact. Some humans will also be excellent at hiding this state, and so they mostly have good reasons for doing that. Many of us have suicidal ideas at some point, but continual, ongoing thoughts of suicide and devising a method to die are symptoms of pathology, and like many illnesses, the must be well-known and treated earlier than a life is lost. However my son’s death was once not in basic terms a suicide. It concerned mass homicide. I wanted to understand how his suicidal pondering grew to become homicidal.However research is sparse and there are no easy answers. Sure, he most of the time had ongoing melancholy. He had a persona that used to be perfectionistic and self-reliant, and that made him much less likely to seek help from others. He had skilled triggering pursuits on the institution that left him feeling debased and humiliated and mad. And he had a difficult friendship with a boy who shared his feelings of rage and alienation, and who used to be critically disturbed, controlling and homicidal. And on high of this period in his life of extreme vulnerability and fragility, Dylan discovered access to guns although we would by no means owned any in our home. It was once appallingly convenient for a 17-yr-old boy to buy guns, both legally and illegally, without my permission or talents. And somehow, 17 years and many college shootings later, it is still appallingly effortless. What Dylan did that day broke my coronary heart, and as trauma so by and large does, it took a toll on my body and on my intellect. Two years after the shootings, I got breast melanoma, and two years after that, i began to have mental health issues.On prime of the steady, perpetual grief I was once terrified that i might run right into a family member of anyone Dylan had killed, or be accosted with the aid of the clicking or by way of an irritated citizen. I was once afraid to activate the news, afraid to listen to myself being known as a horrible parent or a disgusting character. I started having panic attacks. The primary bout started four years after the shootings, once I used to be getting able for the depositions and would need to meet the victims’ households face to face.The 2d round began six years after the shootings, when I was preparing to speak publicly about homicide-suicide for the first time at a convention. Each episodes lasted a few weeks. The assaults occurred all over: within the hardware store, in my office, and even while studying a booklet in mattress. My intellect would suddenly lock into this spinning cycle of terror and regardless of how I difficult i tried to calm myself down or intent my method out of it, i couldn’t do it. It felt as if my brain was looking to kill me, and then, being fearful of being afraid consumed all of my ideas. That’s once I realized firsthand what it feels like to have a malfunctioning intellect, and that’s when I truly grew to become a mind well being suggest. With healing and treatment and self-care, life finally again to anything would be inspiration of as traditional below the situations. When I seemed again on all that had occurred, I could see that my son’s spiral into dysfunction most likely passed off over a period of about two years, plenty of time to get him support, if simplest someone had identified that he wanted help and known what to do.Every time any person asks me, "How could you now not have known?", it feels like a punch within the intestine. It includes accusation and faucets into my emotions of guilt that regardless of how much cure I’ve had i’ll on no account utterly eradicate. But this is something I’ve learned: if love were enough to stop someone who is suicidal from hurting themselves, suicides would infrequently happen. But love is just not adequate, and suicide is regularly occurring. It can be the 2nd leading reason of loss of life for men and women age 10 to 34, and 15 percentage of american adolescence report having made a suicide plan in the last year. I’ve learned that irrespective of how so much we want to feel we will, we can’t know or manipulate the whole lot our loved ones think and feel, and the cussed notion that we are one way or the other one of a kind, that anyone we adore would under no circumstances think of hurting themselves or any person else, can reason us to overlook what’s hidden in simple sight.And if worst case eventualities do come to go, we will have got to be trained to forgive ourselves for now not realizing or for now not asking the correct questions or not discovering the correct therapy. We will have to continuously count on that any one we love may be struggling, despite what they are saying or how they act. We will have to listen with our entire being, without judgments, and without providing solutions. I do know that i will are living with this tragedy, with these multiple tragedies, for the relaxation of my lifestyles. I do know that in the minds of many, what I misplaced are not able to evaluate to what the other families lost. I do know my wrestle would not make theirs any less difficult. I know there are even some who feel I do not have the right to any discomfort, but best to a life of everlasting penance. Sooner or later what i know comes all the way down to this: the tragic fact is that even the most vigilant and dependable of us may not be ready to aid, but for love’s sake, we ought to never stop looking to be aware of the unknowable.Thanks. (Applause) .

[batterymonster2021]

My son was a Columbine shooter. This is my story | Sue Klebold

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/my-son-was-a-columbine-shooter-this-is-my-story-sue-klebold-2/

My son was a Columbine shooter. This is my story | Sue Klebold

The last time I heard my son’s voice was once when he walked out the front door on his strategy to college. He referred to as out one word in the darkness: "Bye." It was once April 20, 1999. Later that morning, at Columbine excessive university, my son Dylan and his buddy Eric killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 others earlier than taking their possess lives. 13 innocent humans were killed, leaving their cherished ones in a state of grief and trauma. Others sustained injuries, some resulting in disfigurement and everlasting disability. However the enormity of the tragedy can’t be measured simplest by means of the quantity of deaths and injuries that took situation. There isn’t any option to quantify the psychological injury of those who were within the tuition, or who took part in rescue or cleanup efforts. There isn’t a strategy to investigate the magnitude of a tragedy like Columbine, primarily when it may be a blueprint for different shooters who go on to commit atrocities of their own.Columbine was a tidal wave, and when the crash ended, it would take years for the community and for society to appreciate its have an impact on. It has taken me years to try to receive my son’s legacy. The merciless habits that defined the end of his life confirmed me that he was once a fully one-of-a-kind man or woman from the one I knew. Afterwards persons requested, "How would you not recognize? What style of a mother have been you?" I still ask myself those same questions. Before the shootings, I suggestion of myself as a just right mother. Serving to my youngsters end up caring, healthful, in charge adults was once the fundamental position of my lifestyles. However the tragedy convinced me that I failed as a mum or dad, and it’s partly this experience of failure that brings me here at present.Aside from his father, I was once the one character who knew and adored Dylan essentially the most. If anybody would have known what used to be taking place, it will have to were me, correct? But I did not be aware of. In these days, i am right here to share the expertise of what it’s like to be the mum of anybody who kills and hurts. For years after the tragedy, I combed via recollections, attempting to figure out exactly the place I failed as a guardian. However there aren’t any easy answers. I can’t provide you with any solutions. All i can do is share what i have learned. After I talk to persons who did not comprehend me before the shootings, i have three challenges to satisfy. First, when I stroll right into a room like this, I in no way be aware of if anybody there has skilled loss seeing that of what my son did. I consider a must renowned the struggling caused by a member of my household who is not right here to do it for himself.So first, with all of my coronary heart, i am sorry if my son has precipitated you ache. The 2d task i’ve is that I have to ask for figuring out and even compassion once I speak about my son’s death as a suicide. Two years earlier than he died, he wrote on a piece of paper in a notebook that he was slicing himself. He stated that he was in ache and wanted to get a gun so he would end his life.I failed to know about any of this until months after his demise. Once I speak about his demise as a suicide, i’m not looking to downplay the viciousness he confirmed on the end of his lifestyles. I’m looking to appreciate how his suicidal thinking led to homicide. After quite a few studying and speaking with authorities, i have come to feel that his involvement in the shootings was once rooted now not in his want to kill but in his desire to die. The 1/3 project i’ve when I speak about my son’s homicide-suicide is that i’m speaking about mental health — excuse me — is that i am speakme about intellectual wellness, or mind well being, as I prefer to call it, because it is more concrete.And in the same breath, i am talking about violence. The last factor I wish to do is to make contributions to the misconception that already exists around mental illness. Only an extraordinarily small percentage of individuals who have a intellectual ailment are violent towards different folks, but of those who die through suicide, it’s estimated that about seventy five to probably greater than ninety percent have a diagnosable mental wellbeing situation of some form. As you all comprehend very good, our intellectual well being care procedure is just not organized to support every body, and now not everybody with damaging ideas suits the criteria for a distinct prognosis. Many who’ve ongoing emotions of fear or anger or hopelessness are under no circumstances assessed or handled. Too most likely, they get our attention only if they attain a behavioral quandary. If estimates are correct that about one to 2 percent of all suicides includes the murder of another person, when suicide charges upward push, as they’re rising for some populations, the homicide-suicide rates will rise as well.I desired to appreciate what was once happening in Dylan’s mind prior to his death, so I regarded for answers from other survivors of suicide loss. I did research and volunteered to help with fund-raising activities, and at any time when I would, I talked with folks who had survived their own suicidal obstacle or try. One of the vital worthy conversations I had used to be with a coworker who overheard me speaking to anyone else in my place of business cubicle. She heard me say that Dylan would now not have adored me if he might do anything as horrible as he did. Later, when she determined me on my own, she apologized for overhearing that dialog, but informed me that I used to be flawed. She said that once she was once a younger, single mom with three babies, she grew to become severely depressed and was hospitalized to preserve her reliable. On the time, she used to be distinct that her kids could be better off if she died, so she had made a plan to finish her existence. She assured me that a mom’s love was once the strongest bond in the world, and that she cherished her kids greater than anything on this planet, but seeing that of her ailment, she was once definite that they would be better off without her.What she mentioned and what I’ve discovered from others is that we don’t make the so-called decision or option to die by means of suicide in the equal method that we choose what vehicle to force or the place to head on a Saturday night time. When any one is in an extremely suicidal state, they’re in a stage 4 clinical wellbeing emergency. Their pondering is impaired and they’ve lost entry to tools of self-governance. Although they are able to make a plan and act with logic, their sense of actuality is distorted by using a filter of agony via which they interpret their fact. Some humans will also be excellent at hiding this state, and so they mostly have good reasons for doing that. Many of us have suicidal ideas at some point, but continual, ongoing thoughts of suicide and devising a method to die are symptoms of pathology, and like many illnesses, the must be well-known and treated earlier than a life is lost. However my son’s death was once not in basic terms a suicide. It concerned mass homicide. I wanted to understand how his suicidal pondering grew to become homicidal.However research is sparse and there are no easy answers. Sure, he most of the time had ongoing melancholy. He had a persona that used to be perfectionistic and self-reliant, and that made him much less likely to seek help from others. He had skilled triggering pursuits on the institution that left him feeling debased and humiliated and mad. And he had a difficult friendship with a boy who shared his feelings of rage and alienation, and who used to be critically disturbed, controlling and homicidal. And on high of this period in his life of extreme vulnerability and fragility, Dylan discovered access to guns although we would by no means owned any in our home. It was once appallingly convenient for a 17-yr-old boy to buy guns, both legally and illegally, without my permission or talents. And somehow, 17 years and many college shootings later, it is still appallingly effortless. What Dylan did that day broke my coronary heart, and as trauma so by and large does, it took a toll on my body and on my intellect. Two years after the shootings, I got breast melanoma, and two years after that, i began to have mental health issues.On prime of the steady, perpetual grief I was once terrified that i might run right into a family member of anyone Dylan had killed, or be accosted with the aid of the clicking or by way of an irritated citizen. I was once afraid to activate the news, afraid to listen to myself being known as a horrible parent or a disgusting character. I started having panic attacks. The primary bout started four years after the shootings, once I used to be getting able for the depositions and would need to meet the victims’ households face to face.The 2d round began six years after the shootings, when I was preparing to speak publicly about homicide-suicide for the first time at a convention. Each episodes lasted a few weeks. The assaults occurred all over: within the hardware store, in my office, and even while studying a booklet in mattress. My intellect would suddenly lock into this spinning cycle of terror and regardless of how I difficult i tried to calm myself down or intent my method out of it, i couldn’t do it. It felt as if my brain was looking to kill me, and then, being fearful of being afraid consumed all of my ideas. That’s once I realized firsthand what it feels like to have a malfunctioning intellect, and that’s when I truly grew to become a mind well being suggest. With healing and treatment and self-care, life finally again to anything would be inspiration of as traditional below the situations. When I seemed again on all that had occurred, I could see that my son’s spiral into dysfunction most likely passed off over a period of about two years, plenty of time to get him support, if simplest someone had identified that he wanted help and known what to do.Every time any person asks me, "How could you now not have known?", it feels like a punch within the intestine. It includes accusation and faucets into my emotions of guilt that regardless of how much cure I’ve had i’ll on no account utterly eradicate. But this is something I’ve learned: if love were enough to stop someone who is suicidal from hurting themselves, suicides would infrequently happen. But love is just not adequate, and suicide is regularly occurring. It can be the 2nd leading reason of loss of life for men and women age 10 to 34, and 15 percentage of american adolescence report having made a suicide plan in the last year. I’ve learned that irrespective of how so much we want to feel we will, we can’t know or manipulate the whole lot our loved ones think and feel, and the cussed notion that we are one way or the other one of a kind, that anyone we adore would under no circumstances think of hurting themselves or any person else, can reason us to overlook what’s hidden in simple sight.And if worst case eventualities do come to go, we will have got to be trained to forgive ourselves for now not realizing or for now not asking the correct questions or not discovering the correct therapy. We will have to continuously count on that any one we love may be struggling, despite what they are saying or how they act. We will have to listen with our entire being, without judgments, and without providing solutions. I do know that i will are living with this tragedy, with these multiple tragedies, for the relaxation of my lifestyles. I do know that in the minds of many, what I misplaced are not able to evaluate to what the other families lost. I do know my wrestle would not make theirs any less difficult. I know there are even some who feel I do not have the right to any discomfort, but best to a life of everlasting penance. Sooner or later what i know comes all the way down to this: the tragic fact is that even the most vigilant and dependable of us may not be ready to aid, but for love’s sake, we ought to never stop looking to be aware of the unknowable.Thanks. (Applause) .

[ellymackay]

5 Things To Know About Sleep And Inflammation

The post 5 Things To Know About Sleep And Inflammation was originally seen on The Elly Mackay Blog

If you pay attention to health issues, you probably hear a lot about inflammation. Chronic inflammation has gotten a lot of attention in recent years as a major contributor to illness and disease.

But how much do you know about the relationship between inflammation and sleep? That relationship brings together two complex and fundamental of the body’s systems—the immune system and our need for sleep. Keeping inflammation in check has big ramifications for our health. Sleeping well may be one way we can guard against the unhealthful inflammation that’s associated with chronic diseases from cancer and heart disease to autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and others.

What is inflammation?

In talking with my patients, I realize that while most of them understand that excessive inflammation can be harmful, many don’t have a strong understanding of what inflammation is, or what it does. Inflammation is a natural, protective biological response from the immune system to fight off harmful foreign pathogens—bacteria, viruses, toxins— that cause illness and disease, and to help the body heal from injury. The symptoms of acute inflammation, including swelling and redness, fever and chills, pain and stiffness, and fatigue, are signs the body’s immune system is in “fight mode,” working hard to neutralize a threat.

We talk a lot about the dangers associated with inflammation. But the body’s inflammatory response it essential to our health and survival.

Problems with inflammation occur when this natural, protective response happens too often, or at the wrong times. Autoimmune diseases occur as a result of the body triggering an inflammatory response when there is no foreign threat present. Instead, the immune system’s pathogen-fighting cells attack the body’s own healthy cells and tissues. Multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus are examples of autoimmune conditions that develop in part from an excessive, misdirected inflammatory response.

Chronic inflammation is also linked to the development of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer—the major chronic and life-threatening diseases of our time. With chronic inflammation, the body’s immune system is in perpetual fight mode, activating disease-fighting cells that have no external threat to fend off. Over time, these fighter cells can attack, wear down, and cause damage to healthy cells, tissues, organs, and systems throughout the body, leading to chronic illness.

What triggers excessive, unhealthful, chronic inflammation? Poor diet, environmental toxins, stress. And, as research shows, poor sleep is a contributor to inflammation.

Sleep and inflammation are regulated by the same bio rhythms

In talking about sleep and the immune system, we’re tackling two of the most complicated processes of the human body. For all our scientific inquiry to sleep, there’s a tremendous amount we don’t know. Though it’s clear we need sleep to survive, scientists still don’t know why we sleep. The human immune system is tremendously complex, and scientists are still working to de-code its operations, to understand how it works—and why things go wrong.

One thing we do know? Sleep, immune function, and inflammation share a common regulator. Our sleep is regulated by circadian rhythms, which drive hormones and other physiological changes that cause us to move back and forth along a continuum of sleep and wakefulness throughout the 24-hour day. Those daily sleep-wake cycles we move through without much thought? Our circadian rhythms are working behind the scenes to keep us on schedule. When circadian rhythms are out of sync, so is sleep.

Circadian rhythms also regulate our immune system, and with it, our levels of inflammation. When circadian rhythms are disrupted, so is normal immune function. We’re more prone to unhealthful inflammation, and more at risk for diseases, including metabolic disease, cancer, and heart disease.

One way to help keep circadian rhythms in sync is to maintain a consistent sleep routine. Our bio rhythms thrive on consistency. Going to bed at the same time and waking at the same time every day reinforces the healthy circadian rhythms that govern both our sleep and our immune function, including inflammation.

Too little sleep triggers inflammation. So does too much sleep.

Scientists still have a lot to learn about the specifics of the relationship between sleep and inflammation. But there’s already a strong body of research showing that lack of sleep raises levels of inflammation in the body. Laboratory studies have tested acute, prolonged sleep deprivation—conditions under which sleep is restricted for 24 hours or more—and found this severe degree of sleep loss increases inflammation activity in the body. Scientists have also studied partial sleep deprivation, the kind of chronic, insufficient sleep that so many people experience in their daily lives. While the study results are mixed, many studies show this form of everyday sleep loss also elevates inflammation.

It might surprise you to learn that sleeping too much can also trigger unhealthful inflammation. A 2016 study reviewed more than 70 scientific investigations into the relationship between inflammation and sleep. It found that in addition to short sleep’s negative effects on the immune system’s inflammatory response, sleeping excessively also raised levels of key inflammatory markers, including C-reactive protein, which is associated with heart disease, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.

Getting the right amount of sleep for you—for most adults, that’s between 7-9 hours a night—on a consistent basis is one way to help avoid low-grade, systemic inflammation that’s associated with aging and chronic disease.

Just one night of poor sleep can spike inflammation

The long-term effects of poor sleep on health are a major public health concern. The influence sleep can have on inflammation is a significant factor in managing health and guarding against disease over the course of our lives. But it doesn’t take years, or months, for sleep to have negative effects on inflammation levels. According to research, it takes as little as a single night. Research has shown that one night of insufficient sleep is enough to activate pro-inflammatory processes in the body. A 2008 study found that one single night of partial sleep resulted in significantly higher levels of NF-kB, a protein complex that acts as a powerful signal to stimulate inflammation throughout the body. One noteworthy aspect of this study: the researchers found the higher inflammatory response occurred in female subjects, but not in male subjects. The differences in the ways women and men respond to sleep loss are important, and under-studied. Sleep’s effects over inflammation may be one area where women and men experience different degrees of consequence—and that could have implications for their vulnerabilities to chronic disease. This is an area of study that needs more attention.

It’s easy to write off a single night of poor sleep as no big deal. But every night of sleep counts. Along with your ability to function at your best mentally, and feel your best physically, a commitment to getting a full night of restful sleep—every night—makes a difference at a cellular level, in your body’s ability to keep inflammation in check.  

Stress is a major player in the sleep-inflammation relationship

You’ve heard me talk before about the deep connections between sleep and stress. Stress is a common obstacle to sleep. Worried, on high alert, agitated and anxious—these emotional and physical states of stress make it difficult to fall asleep and to sleep soundly throughout a full night. In turn, not getting enough sleep makes us more vulnerable to the physical and emotional effects of stress. We’re more likely to sink deeper into a stressful state when we’re tired and short on rest. Many people fall into a difficult cycle: ending the day stressed out, having a hard time sleeping, feeling exhausted and even more stressed the next day—which leads to more problems sleeping.

This chronic sleep-stress cycle does more than make us tired and irritable. Stress is also a trigger for inflammation. At a biological level, our bodies respond to mental and emotional stress as they would to a harmful pathogen, or to a direct physical threat: with a “fight or flight” response that alters immune system functioning and kicks inflammation into higher gear. Over time, chronic stress creates systemic, low-grade inflammation that wears at the health of our cells and makes us more vulnerable to disease.

We’ve all heard the adage that stress is bad for our health. Science is now identifying just what that means, and how stress contributes to disease by stimulating inflammation. A 2017 study identified the critical connections between chronic stress, increased inflammation, and the development of a range of diseases including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and depression. Researchers in this study illustrate a relationship where stress-induced inflammation is the “common soil” from this spectrum of serious, chronic diseases can grow.

Sleep has a powerful, dual role to play in this complex interaction with stress and inflammation. Sleeping well can work directly to keep inflammation in check by avoiding the pro-inflammatory activity that occurs in the presence of poor, dysregulated sleep. And sleep offers us significant protection against stress, itself a major contributor to chronic inflammation—a now known pathway to disease.

Gut health matters, too

One of the most exciting areas of sleep and health research involves the human microbiome. (I’m a member of Scientific Advisory Board at UBiome, an innovative organization that’s dedicated to investigation and education of the microbiome and its impact on health, performance, aging, and disease.)

Our microbiome is the vast, dynamic, ever-shifting collection of bacteria and other micro-organisms that live within our bodies. The largest collection of this microbial life resides in our intestines—hence, the focus on “gut health.” This intestinal body of microbiota is often referred to as the “second brain,” because of its profound influence over how we think, feel, and function.

(I’ve written in detail about the connections between the human microbiome and sleep here, and here.)

We’re learning more all the time about the importance of gut health to sleep and overall health. An unhealthy gut contributes to chronic inflammation. How does a gut become unhealthy? Poor diet, stress, medication and illness are all contributors. So, too are disrupted circadian rhythms and poor sleep. Poor and insufficient sleep appear to change the composition of our natural microbiota, decreasing beneficial bacteria and increasing bacteria associated with disease. The emerging science points to a powerful two-way street between sleep and gut health. Sleeping well is one way to help maintain a healthy gut. And maintaining gut health—by managing stress, exercising, eating a healthy diet that’s rich in prebiotic (fiber-rich) foods—can help you sleep better. Both those pillars—healthy sleep and a balanced, thriving gut—can work to limit harmful inflammation, and may help deliver long-term protection against disease.

Chronic and systemic inflammation doesn’t always come with symptoms. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a pervasive risk to our health. Sleep well can be a potent tool in helping guard against this often silent, and damaging, form of inflammation.

Sweet Dreams,

Michael J. Breus, PhD, DABSM

The Sleep Doctor

www.thesleepdoctor.com

from Your Guide to Better Sleep https://www.thesleepdoctor.com/2019/01/01/5-things-to-know-about-sleep-and-inflammation/

from Elly Mackay - Feed https://www.ellymackay.com/2019/01/02/5-things-to-know-about-sleep-and-inflammation/

[mollyjoycupcake]

9/3/2018

Things have been quite a ride since I last wrote here. 

I did manage to survive the spring semester, if that is what you are wondering. I had to drop calc and physics, and take a medical withdrawal for linear algebra, but I ended up passing intro to engineering, engineering success, computer science, and latin sol immersion. Although I did make it through the semester, I am afraid it was to my detriment. Forcing myself to go through that simply wasn’t worth the sacrifice of my mental health. I’m fairly certain that I walked away with some trauma, both from specific events but also as a general effect of the constant, drawn out stress. I never quite got used to the noise at the apartment (I found out why, which is what I’ll talk about later), and I never quite made any friends, with the exception of Taksha. Although I was somewhat proud to finish my classes, I was much too drained to really appreciate that I had made it. And, of course, any positive emotion I would have felt was taken away by the unexpected news that VR wouldn’t cover rent during the summer (which I wasn’t aware of, nor was prepared for). So, because I couldn’t come up with $1,000 in rent in two weeks, I went back to Santa Fe to stay with Shawn. 

Although our relationship had almost completely fallen apart over the spring semester, returning to Santa Fe was an attractive (and probably my only) option at the time. My parents had moved out of their house to a campsite in June, rendering themselves technically homeless. I was at a negative balance both emotionally and financially, so I figured a familiar and low-key place would do me good. To this day, I’m not certain if it was really the best choice, because these past few months have been incredibly difficult. But, I guess it makes no sense to dwell on it. Just need to find a solution and move on. 

In June, after we took a trip to Florida and Disney World, I started modeling by being a part of Santa Fe Fashion Week’s runway show. I simply sent the director a DM and he put me in the show. It was a great experience and I learned a lot. After that, in late June through July, I then began working in background for television shows in New Mexico. I was featured background as a “cheerleader” and “high school student” for the new netflix show Chambers, background for Midnight Texas, and background for Messiah. I also had a small acting role in Midnight Texas as a ghost witch. I think I may get IMDB credit for it.  In late July/early August I began a 4 week job as a stand in for the main actress in a movie for Netflix called Walk Ride Rodeo. I also appeared in the background in several scenes as a nurse, a patient, and rodeo-goer. The hours were long and hard and I struggled to get through it. It was 5 days a week, for about 14 hours a day. I made decent money, but the exhaustion and the lack of free time made it hard to be worth it. Once that movie was over, I moved on to some more modeling with the RD3 Elite fashion show, and then I attended two casting calls. On one casting call, I was hired on the spot to do photos for the covers of romance novels. I am still waiting to hear back on the other one, so cross your fingers. If I get it, I will be part of a traveling fashion show out of LA (and it’s paid). Although all these experiences would be exciting for anyone, I have a hard time even feeling anything due to my mental state. It’s frustrating because I would like to appreciate it, but I can’t seem to right now. 

Aside from those activities, my summer has been relatively uneventful. I have struggled to get through every day. It has been hard to process all the traumas from the spring semester. Things with Shawn have been rocky, which is both a cause and effect of my perpetuated mood issues. I finally decided to seek help during the last week of August, when I couldn’t stop crying all week. I think the long hours on the movie finally broke me down. I decided to go to the ER to be evaluated. They had me stay overnight and I spoke to a few counselors and psychiatrists. We agreed that a likely cause for my symptoms was the Nexplanon implant, so we made a plan to get it removed at the women’s clinic the following week. The doctor also got me in to see a reputable psychiatrist the next week, who formally diagnosed me with PTSD (as opposed to the typical depression/anxiety diagnosis I was given previously). I started two new medications that are supposed to address PTSD specifically, so I am hopeful that it will be effective. I also did get my Nexplanon removed, but because I was so anxious and the implant was very deep, I had to be given Xanax and Oxycodone to get through the procedure. I think seeing that finally seeing that bloody thing in the tweezers in the doctor’s hand was one of the most relieving moments of my life! It is still too soon to tell if the removal of the nexplanon plus the addition of the drugs has helped me very much (its been less than a week), but statistical information has me hopeful.  

The biggest thing on my plate right now (aside from healing from PTSD) is now deciding whether or not to return to ASU or become a resident of New Mexico. Both situations have ample pros and cons. At ASU I would be closer to my family, and I would have the climate that I want. I also have a nagging suspicion that if my symptoms get under control, a lot of personal growth could occur there (at least, in the way I want it to). Also, there is something to be said about the youthful and vibrant culture that surrounds Tempe. However, staying in New Mexico could be good as well. There are several schools to choose from that are all reputable and more affordable than ASU. It is also less populated and therefore more peaceful out here. I would also remain close to Shawn, which is good if we decide to remain together. New Mexico also has a lot of modeling and film industry, as well as two national labs, so if I want, I do have a successful double life as a STEM person as well as an entertainment person. Additionally, the medicare in New Mexico has much better coverage and includes dental and vision (which AZ medicare lacks), so if I get medicare here, I can get my broken tooth fixed, which could save me a few thousand dollars. As you can see, both options seem fairly attractive. There are many cons to each option, however. For ASU, they are kind of obvious: if I can’t get my symptoms under control, I will end up overwhelmed just like the spring semester. It is also very busy and chaotic, which may simply may not be the best for me, regardless of mental health. I would also be far away from Shawn, which would really strain the relationship, as well as my emotional state, and could end up forcing us to split. I would also need to know exactly which major to pursue in order to secure VR funding, and there is no guarantee that the funding will be enough to guarantee a comfortable existence, due to the rising costs and the lowering funds available from VR. As far as New Mexico goes, by staying here I would be far away from my family. Although my family does stress me out sometimes, I do like to be close to them so that we can be there for each other (especially now, as things are stressful for all of us). I am also not entirely sure if I like UNM  or Albuquerque yet. There is also the fact that if I get residency here (in order to get medicaid and such) I would lose my AZ residency and VR funding, which would make it very difficult to return to ASU if I change my mind. I am not quite sure if I am comfortable with cutting the AZ ties just yet. Another fear I have about staying in NM is, what if Shawn and I end up splitting anyway? It would be extremely difficult to live in the same town if we were no longer together. Just the thought of potentially seeing him with someone else tears me apart. 

In general, this is a very huge decision. I would be lying if I said I felt equipped to handle such a major life decision. I have a difficult enough time deciding what drink to order at Starbucks (even though I always get the same thing), so deciding where I want to live and study for the next two years is extremely overwhelming. I am very distressed by it. Part of me just wants to be a kid again so I don’t have to be burdened by all these thoughts. I am far too aware, and worried of, all the implications that come with each possible route. All of this, combined with the fact that I don’t have much money, makes things seem impossible. I can’t even pay rent right now, so how could I possibly decide where to settle in for school? Do I even want to go to school any more? Do I even have a choice? Maybe I should run away and travel the world. But without money? Maybe I should just drop out and work and make lots of money. But how? And with what mental health? I guess the only place I can start is by listing my basic needs, which would need to be fulfilled regardless of location, and then selecting location based on what would be best suited for my needs.

As far as I know my needs include: healthcare coverage, adequate mental health/psychiatric support, friends, access to high calibur dance training, proximity to family, proximity to shawn, access to further STEM exploration and employment, a low stress living environment, quiet home, either living alone or with good roommates, a degree program that is fun and not too stressful, opportunities in modeling and entertainment, a structured schedule that allows for creative expression and self care.  I would type more, but my brain fog is starting to set in (along with a headache). 

Hopefully I will be able to reach a decision soon. Perhaps I am struggling because I am attempting to intuit a decision instead of making hard, conscious choices for myself. I’ve always preferred going with my gut, because I am terrified of making a conscious decision that ends up going wrong. I would rather blame god than blame myself. 

[protestmagazine]

Counsel the Creatives: Mental health in the community Community

a journal entry

A few months ago I promised myself never to live the romanticized life of the ‘tortured artist.’ The tortured artist lifestyle seems to focus on remaining tragic because it's thought of as beautiful, not about finding beauty in tragedy. They perpetuate a state of melancholia by choice and through their actions, not because of uncontrollable circumstances. Melancholia becomes them. I don't want that, I want to be happy. Before denouncing my trauma as my identity, I thought I would only want to write from the perspective of a broken version of myself. I was happy to settle with quiet suffering, grappling at life through the scope of unchecked mental health issues. Settling for tough memories alone as motivation for writing only stunted my growth as a writer. Still, It took years to undo the habit of reducing myself to sad stories. Now I know, and I mean I really know, and understand that there is more. I am not a sad story.

Art is great for healing, I believe that. Creative work is a great way to reconcile with traumatic experiences. I get that, but, mental unrest shouldn't be a prerequisite for creation. And what's an artist supposed to do when they are so overcome with symptoms of mental illness, the ability to create anything disappears? No one is immune from experiencing mental health disorders in their lifetime but the presence of mental illness within creative communities in particular runs rampant.

Theories on what perpetuates the link between mental illness and creative people are abundant. It's been said the creative person’s vulnerability, eccentricities, and desire to isolate themselves can initiate and fuel mental health disorders. The creative person is vulnerable in that we want to experience everything fully, by fully I mean being present in all ways- emotional, mental, and physical availability. Artists tend to remain fully present even when situations become toxic or harmful. Self-preservation becomes an afterthought.

Pictured above: Kei Slaughter performs at the Mental Health Music Showcase at Three Keys

I wonder how the public's consumption of art affects the artist. After spending countless hours pouring their heart into their craft, let's imagine the creative person finally produces work they are proud of. They become visible in ways they may not have been ready for, their work becomes a subject of criticism. The artist may thrive in the energy focused on them, whether they are mer with good reviews or not, they enjoy the convsersations happening as a result of their work. Or the artist, still very much vulnerable, becomes weak under pressure. They might shrink if criticism is too negative or conversly anxious if critism goes well. Lots of people are afraid of their success. An irrational fear that they've already reached their peak. How are we supporting the artist after they've been completed consumed by us?

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and New Orleans Musicians Clinic came together for a Mental Health Music Showcase days before the start of Essence Fest. New Orleans Musicians Clinic created an inclusive outreach program for people within creative communities called, You Got This. The program focuses on suicide prevention and connecting people to clinically effective self-care resources.

NAMI and N.O. Musicians Clinic are strengthening the community of artists living with mental health issues with peer-to-peer education programs and events. Artists from the showcase performed original music in a dark venue, dimly lit by small candles on tabletops. The setting was... romantic, intimate, and vulnerable. The musicians were present in body and mind which in turn demanded the attention of the audience. They all spoke candidly about using music as a coping mechanism during and after traumatic experiences. We, consumers of their craft, listened compassionately to the music out of respect for its meaning and the artist behind it. Music for survival. Another trend among the artists was acknowledging the importance of support from their chosen families and bandmates. Creatives who come together to validate each other's experiences with mental illnesses is liberation. They can see a reflection of Self in the success of their peers and show compassion when needed- slowly shedding the feel of isolation and building trust.

I worked hard to release conditions of my mental health as parts that encompass my identity. That's a form of shrinking myself that I promise not to participate in anymore. As I worked through that false belief, I also needed to learn that my best work wouldn't come from pain. My pain isn't a condition of my artistic talent and success. True creativity, to me, comes from experiencing everything fully- emotional, mental, and physical availability. How can I be fully present while under the fog of OCD, anxiety, and depression? How can I develope as a creative if I only channel melancholy to create? There is always more. Expansion; moving from the tunnel vision of mental illness to the vastness of mentally wellness.

 Resources for (creative) people who could use some help cultivating mental wellness.

As found on New Orleans Musician Clinic / You Got This

Crisi Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 from anywhere in the US with any type of crisis, at any time

Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8225)

Trans Lifeline Hotline: 877-565-8860

Trevor Project 24/7 Hotline: Staffed by transgender people to aid transgender people's well-being 866-488-7386

BeyondNow Suicide Safety Planning Tool: A tool for creating a suicide safety plan, it outlines ways to known and handle warming signs, identifying reasons to live, create a list of compassionate supportive people in your live, professional support, and more.  Click here for more information and forlinks to download the apps on iTunes and GooglePlay

National Alliance on Mental Illness - the nation's largest grassroots mental health organization. They educate and advocate for millions of Americans living with mental illnesses. You can also reach them by calling their HelpLine, Mon-Fri 10-6PM EST, at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264). Click here for an even longer list of their resources and recommendations for more organizations and hotlines for assistance. 

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

What You Should Know Before You Say 'Addiction Is A Choice'

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/food-health/what-you-should-know-before-you-say-addiction-is-a-choice/

What You Should Know Before You Say 'Addiction Is A Choice'

“What You Should Know Before You Say ‘Addiction Is a Choice’” was published on The Mighty.

Written by Kel B.

They say: Addiction is a choice and you should just stop.

I do not understand the belief held by some that one chooses to become addicted. If addiction is defined as a compulsion to do something or behave a certain way repetitiously regardless of the negative consequences, I find little logic in anyone doing this by choice. Especially if it interferes with the well being of one’s life or hurts the ones we love.

My education and experience tells me addiction doesn’t start out as an act beyond our control. It begins in a slow, progressive notion and we often don’t even recognize its enormous growth until well beyond the awareness of many of those around us. Which, for a time at least, we will adamantly deny.

At first, we try something meant to give us a pleasurable experience and we enjoy the way it makes us feel. We like the giddiness of that first glass of wine after a stress filled day, or that rush of excitement in a winning hand at blackjack. And then we do it again and achieve the same results. And eventually, like it enough to create meaning around it. 

We organize birthday barbecues and football parties where consuming large amounts of alcohol is an acceptable way to “celebrate” the occasion. We plan “family” trips to Vegas yet don’t see the outside of those dark walls for days because we are one step away from hitting the jackpot.  Euphoria and fulfillment and the broken promise of happily ever after are just beyond our reach.

We ignore the onlookers who frown at our behaviors and we discount their judgment as simply not knowing how to “have fun” or live on the edge. What we don’t realize is our behaviors have stopped being “fun” long ago, and we are wickedly close to falling off the edge, but we are forever chasing that euphoric feeling that swept us off our feet in the honeymoon phase of our distorted relationship with addiction.

What we also fail to recognize in our blindness of addiction is that not only are we continuing to do it because of the the way it makes us feel, we are equally doing it for the way it makes us not feel. Research is only growing about addictions being a common yet detrimental escape from the unwelcomed experiences of our past. An incomplete mourning for the loss of something or someone meaningful to us that subsequently changes the direction of our life path.

An unexpected death of a close family member or friend, a difficult divorce, an unwanted move or loss of a job can all take considerable chunks of well being out of a previously unscathed being. These adverse experiences can happen in our childhood or as an adult and can weaken our whole existence and life motivation. Especially when those around us are equally effected and unable to help mend our pain because of their own.

It is of no surprise anxiety and depression frequently intertwine in the tumultuous relationship with addiction. And so begins the infinite cycle of turning to our addictions to numb the pain, which further inflames the anxiety of our choices and fuels our depressed state of being. Only causing us to turn toward our addiction all the more.

Soon we learn to escape our fears and insecurities with our addiction because we feel forcefully giddy and excited about what we are doing at that moment that brings us pleasure. And we create misconceptions — that somehow we will achieve ultimate satisfaction and perpetual happiness. Or at least we won’t think about the pain. At least not today.

Eventually this relationship with addiction evolves from giving pleasure and avoiding pain to becoming a necessary evil to merely exist. The compulsion sets in and our minds become fixated on our unquenchable urge for that next drink. Oftentimes, our bodies develop a physical dependence we can no longer ignore. So we drink to stop our hands from shaking. We do it to feel “normal” again, at least enough to function in our daily routine. We gamble away that last dollar to suffice the unattainable desire to double our wins. To win back that lost tax return that was meant to pay our mortgage. To get back that feeling of euphoric satisfaction and enjoyment we felt when we first met our addiction.

In the end and without help beyond ourselves, addiction overpowers us with a curse that becomes so strong, nothing and no one in our own innately selfish-driven world can stop us from it. Not our spouses, our children, our parents, our failing health or our careers. Not one thing can stand between our addiction and our mind. We have succumbed to a curse that is larger than us and it becomes stronger than our ability to make any choice to stop. We stand to lose it all and that still might not be enough to stop the insanity. The curse destroys all that was good in our lives and renders us hopeless for a better tomorrow.

Therefore, what they should say…

Addiction is a disease that needs help to recover.

According to multiple health reports published within the National Institute of Drug Abuse and Harvard Health Publications, researchers now recognize addiction as a chronic and reoccurring disease that changes both neurological brain structure and overall cognitive function. This transformation happens as the brain experiences a series of chemical changes, beginning with recognition of pleasure and the lessening of its effect with continued use of that which once gave us enjoyment, and ending with a drive toward compulsive behaviors attempting  to sustain it.

What we once found to be pleasurable in its infancy is altered within our brains to result in a compulsion for utter destruction in the part of our brain we rely on for emotion and pleasure. Our brain is no longer functioning the same way as before we became addicted. So we act on our compulsions because pleasure becomes impossible without intensifying our addictive tendencies.

This alteration in our brain and resulting compulsion is real, and when intermingled with the weakening grip on our addiction and all that once had meaning in our lives, it destroys. And it knows no social, racial or economic barriers.  It can creep into the least expecting community, impact whole cultures and span multiple generations. Whether it be personally impactful, or through the far reaching ripple effect that results because of it. Ultimately, no one escapes unharmed. Addiction is that strong.

But there can be hope. Hope that there can be change.

To say addiction is a choice and not a disease that needs help is only further perpetuating the stigma that has carried on for decades, and for many, has contributed to loss of time spent having a life worth living. Or worse, of living any life at all.

To say addiction is a choice and not a disease that needs help is only further perpetuating the stigma that has carried on for decades.

Recognizing addiction as a potentially life threatening disease that requires continuous effort to recover successfully can allow us to make a much needed paradigm shift in our morally judgmental way of thinking. And to dispel the assumption that all those who suffer continue to do so by their own choosing, can begin to awaken the possibility that recovery exists. But it can not be done without a sincere commitment to end the stigma that at times prevents many from venturing toward the narrow path of healing.

I believe this commitment may include reaching beyond the current treatment models with floundering success rates and incorporating additional unorthodox and holistic methods that are slowly gaining more acceptance in the professional recovery communities. We can begin to focus on tailored recovery modalities because no longer can we assume that the traditional ways will always work for everyone.

My personal and still very raw experience with addiction and recovery has yet to be shared, but there is no doubt in my forever recovering mind the addiction that was in my path was not there by any ounce of my own choosing. My path to destruction came upon me as the horrific and overpowering curse that it was and mentally stole a mother from her children for 18 months of their lives I can never get back. It rendered me helpless for weeks on end and ultimately ended the career I had spent 15 years building for the person I mistakingly thought I wanted to be. It swallowed my joy and buried deep into my unconscious mind all that I once loved. It changed the unscathed child I yearned to be and morphed me into a monstrous entity my conscious mind will never want to know. 

Regardless of what society continues to say about addiction, my personal truth will always be I didn’t willingly choose addiction. Rather the disease of addiction chose me. And it was only through the brokenness of my entire being and the insanity of my disastrous mind that I found the miraculous help and saving grace that gave me strength to overcome my addiction that almost became stronger than my will to survive.

This post first appeared on Kel’s Penzu. 

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Getting rid of incubus/succubus

Modern science of psychology would explain away the phenomenon of having sexual dream as a reflex of suppressed libido which unleashed itself from the realm of subconsciousness during sleep. If this would be the case, which sounded so positively helpful a natural mental process of self-healing mechanism built in the human psyche, then why the prolonged exhaustion after waking up, and not to mention the overwhelming mental fatigue? Because it is not something happened by your imagination, but an actual entity invaded your personal sovereignty during your sleep.  

Have you ever noticed, whenever you become conscious of your dream surrounding and happenings, you are usually in a passive state of mind, either observing something or participating in group activity, usually going along with what’s happening and not having a mind of your own to judge in order to exert change on the situation. It is this passive state of mind makes a person vulnerable to manipulations by any dark entities. 

Incubus or succubus are low-level scums on the broad spectrum of species in the kingdom of darkness. Likened to a mosquito, and as a mosquito on the food-chain of animal kingdom, incubus and succubus are also at the bottom of food-chain in the kingdom of darkness. Appropriately, what they do and how they survive are likened to mosquito. Mosquito lives on blood, and incubus and succubus live on your soul energy extracted through sexual exploitation during your sleep. This is why a person visited by these low level scum would feel so tired even after long hours of sleep. They have drained all your inner energy through sexual activities perpetuated upon you while you were in your passive state of mind. Have you ever seen a hypnotized person and how they act out according to the will of the hypnotizer? The hypnotized passively and obediently act out all, and no matter how grotesque and unbelievable it was, that asked of him/her by the hands of the hypnotizer. 

But why sexual energy? By just making a simple inference from the existence of numerous occult topics on sex rituals/magics, as well as the theory of creating soul-ties with every person one had sexual intercourse, we can know that there are tremendous spiritual energies embedded in sexuality of a human being. Something like, when sexual activity happens, your inner energy which usually resides in various locations in your body begin to concentrate and condense and converge, forms into a single stream that flows out of you, sort of like that song, “all of you and all of me.” 

In this case with sex vampires, they are predators hidden from the visible sight, some people might get a sense of something is lurking around watching you. They wait when you fall into that state of oblivion, then they make their move descend upon you. There’s usually an uneasy feeling when they are around, you feel alert while falling into sleep. When they finally do come in upon you, you’d feel the shaking of your body and the bed underneath you. Unlike meaningful sex between a man and a woman designed and permitted by God, a mutually rewarding and secure exchange of spiritual energy happens. Sex with demons, or rather, raped by demons as you would never consent to it in your right mind and they took advantage of your passive state of mind hypnotized you, would be the worst kind. Not only you are defiled, but also robbed of all your inner energy as these unclean spirits syphon all of you into themselves through sexual manipulations at your passive and hypnotized state of mind during the sleep. 

The symptom that you are been robbed by an incubus/succubus is feeling very tired and drained of all your energy that even 10 hours of sleep cannot seem to alleviate the syndrome. Mental fatigue, it takes longer time to recall something happened yesterday or just a few hours ago. Bad mood, easily feeling stressed and even depressed. All of which are signs of physical and mental weakening as your supporting energy inside of you are being withdrawn, syphoned off you, by sex vampires. 

As for myself, I had experienced all the physical and mental fatigue symptoms caused by uninvited visit of incubus. In many dreams, I’d see myself getting enamored with a strange man who I can only see to its neck (yes, it’s an “its,” it was not a human being but a “it.”) While feeling the guilt of doing something sinful, there was no will power in me to resist its advance. The “man’s” figure changes in each dream, the explanation to it, unless it was different incubus every time, or it was shapeshifting every time. Sometimes it would take upon a form of well-known celebrity to whom I have no penchant for in my waking hours. The interaction with it would always be resistance-free, as if we have been close friends, even lovers for a long time, thus, the sexual advance next. I’d suddenly break out of that hypnotized state when it tries to breach the threshold point. Even though there was no remembered sexual intercourse in my case, I’d still feel severely drained in those days. I have come to the conclusion that just being in the presence of these energy leeches will also result in losing your energy to them. Unlike a touch of a loved one that energizes you, their touch to you is like a full powered vacuum placed against a well will suck you dry. 

The antidote? Pray to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. I got seriously concerned, after getting drained consecutively for days. I prayed to Father, asking Him to send His angels to arrest these unclean spirits that were harassing me. Our Father is faithful and almighty, whosoever put their trust in Him shall never want for strength. The result was I had dramatically well rest the following night, woken up after 5 hours of sleep, feeling refreshed and ready for the day. Praise our God, all glory be His because He is worthy. 

At some point in future, it’s possible some new incubus would once again risk their time allowed on earth to offend. Because they are cursed to live as energy leeches. Be not afraid nor worried, know that this class of unclean spirits is only the bottom of food chain in the vast kingdom of darkness, there are more powerful and cunning enemies out there. This battle with evil forces shall not end until the day of the return of Jesus Christ. If you are purchased by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, becoming a bondman or bondwoman to our Lord, know that His power is above all the powers combined, and He is faithful and all-knowing. You shall be preserved through your love and faith in Him. 

The prayer to our Father in the Heaven against incubus/succubus, or any other types of unclean spirits/demons harassing you.

“Father God, I pray for your mercy and deliverance in this matter. There are unclean spirits (the crime they do to you) during my sleep, would you please send your angels to make them accountable to the name of Jesus Christ. Arrest all of them and take them to the feet of Jesus Christ to be judged before their time. Thank you Father, in Jesus name. Amen.”

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How I Healed My Inner Child

Growing older does not mean we’ve actually grown “up”. Aging chronologically and mentally are two very different things, as my young adult life so brilliantly demonstrated.

I was completely out of control: alcohol abuse, depression and would throw temper tantrums that would make a three year old blush, if I didn’t get my way. I had the mentality of a rebellious child, but well into my twenties.

And while I was well aware that my dysfunctional childhood was at the root of the problem, I had no idea how to rectify this bad behavior that had been around for almost as long as I had been.

Growing up with abuse, neglect and abandonment left me in a perpetual state of defense and instability. I countered those insecurities with mass quantities of alcohol, overcompensation and overachieving.

Until I began reading self help books (at the desperate suggestion of my soon to be husband) I had no idea that I could go back and heal the past traumas of my life. To be honest, I was always so busy avoiding my past and any pain associated with it, to ever reflect on it’s damaging effects on my life or how I might heal it.

As I devoured a mountain of books and audios, tools began to jump out at me. As I practiced them, I watched my life transform before my eyes. My body, behavior and relationships all bloomed to the point where I was off all medications for my depression, anxiety and attention deficit disorder.

The joy of transforming my life hails in comparison to the fulfillment I have experienced sharing my tools with others, through my book and blogs just like this one. So it brings me great pleasure to share the three exercises that set my soul free from childhood dysfunction:

Forgiveness

This is not the sexy answer I’m sure you were seeking, but trust me; if you can overcome the initial resistance to forgiving those who hurt you, you will set yourself free for life. Understand this: every person on the planet is doing their best with the wisdom, experience and abilities that they have, or they would do better.

Truly believing that is step one to forgiving. Step two is agreeing that forgiveness is not letting the other person off the hook, it’s letting YOU off the hook for the burden of carrying around that resentment. As Wayne Dyer so eloquently explained, people do not die of a snake bite, they die from the venom. Resentment is that venom that you are refusing to release. Forgiveness can happen in an instant, the moment you decide you’re ready.

Who do you need to forgive? (And don’t forget to include yourself on that list, if need be)

Rewriting My Story

This was by far the most powerful exercise I’ve done to heal my childhood trauma. We all have the ability to rewrite our past. Life isn’t what happens to us, its the interpretation that we create for that situation. We keep stories in our minds of what has happened to us (from our point of view) and what that means to us. By consciously going back and rewriting that story in our minds we can create new pathways for our minds to reflect on that event.

For example: when I was in grade four, my family of five had to live in someone’s camper (parked in their driveway) for a month. This used to bring me so much shame, but after rewriting it and accepting it, I am now able to talk about it as a point of pride, and an example of how strong and courageous my family was to stay positive during hard times like that. What used to bring me fear of uncertainty, now brings certainty that I can survive whatever life brings me.

What traumatic events can you rewrite? Write down an event, and try to twist it into a positive by highlighting the lessons you learned and how it made you stronger. It may take a while for that new version to really be wired into your memories, but continue to repeat it when you remember and eventually it will feel as natural as the first story you told yourself.

Meditation and Mindfulness

Connecting to myself daily through prayer or meditation has been incredibly healing for me. It gives me a chance to check in, to reflect and to give thanks for all of the experiences in my life. I may not have known it then, but all circumstances, good and bad, serve us on a massive scale.

Life is about growth and evolution, and without obstacles to overcome we would never improve and would never know what we are truly made of.

I no longer struggle with the fear of the future, because I’ve revamped the old list of “childhood traumas” with a new list of examples that prove I am unstoppable. This list is the exact same situations, but entirely new perceptions of them. And through forgiveness and meditation I have given myself a new lease on life.

Our past does not define us. Nor is our past our future. But something needs to change if we want our lives to change, and most often the thing that needs to change is us.

from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2017/04/13/how-i-healed-my-inner-child/