“Wokeness” is a baby’s insult, like cooties, for use by adult-aged childish people who prefer a sophisticated sounding synonym for “poopy head” to use against those they hate for making them feel insecure, bigoted, stupid and inferior. Nice to see they’re giving the merch away for free, if you can believe any come-on by the cynical hucksters who ruthlessly exploit their innocently faithful believers.
Here’s a little story to illustrate what a perfectly reasonable story is made of, particularly in our age of manipulative social media and the algorithms that keep everyone’s eyes glued to their phones to have our biases confirmed over and over, our outrage stoked.
Here are the elements of a reasonable story: the setup is something people can relate to, the unfolding tale is something that rings a bell of true life for them, the ending makes perfect sense in light of the rest of it. If you trust the storyteller, the context of the story is familiar, and emotionally resonant, the story will be perfectly reasonable to most people. A story that sounds perfectly reasonable, given the culture we live in , leaves you with no real questions.
So, yesterday I went into a big sporting goods store in a mall, a chain store. There were two greeters at the door, a male and a female. Neither one acknowledged me as I approached, neither one could be bothered to turn their heads one inch in my direction. I was walking slowly with a cane, talking to them, and these two fitness models never even turned to look at me. I wanted to know where the shoe department was. I was looking for shoes with the greatest possible cushioning, to try to help my painful knees.
Asking these two for help was like talking to a fucking wall. I understand they don’t get paid much, probably minimum wage, and they are from a younger generation, one that doesn’t always make eye contact with humans as much as with screens, but I was asking very little of them, almost nothing. “Excuse me, can you direct me to the shoe department?”
“Hello,” I said, trying to get their attention. After the third or fourth attempt I got the message loud and clear. I was very tempted to tell them to go fuck themselves, but just limped off to find the shoe department on my own.
The salesman who helped me was very nice, and helpful, and I wound up finding a comfortable pair of very cushioning shoes. I told him about the two greeters who had been so rude, literally pretending to be deaf and blind. He smiled indulgently, sympathetically, what else could he actually do?
I didn’t hold it against him, there was nothing he could do about his rude colleagues. He did his job well, made good recommendations, accurately predicted which of the three pairs of shoes he brought out for me to try on I’d wind up buying. A very nice guy and I’m hopeful the shoes will help ease my painful bone on bone, metal on metal, knee caps. If not, this chain has a very reasonable return policy of 90 days, as long as I don’t abuse the shoes during that time.
I completely forgot about those two dick heads by the front door, until I had to pass them again on the way out. I called out “goodbye” in a loud voice and neither of these robotic pricks so much as turned their heads to acknowledge I was there.
I took their picture before I left, so you can see what we are all up against in the greatest nation Jesus ever personally gave his blessings of peace and freedom, and the Second Amendment, to.
It’s impossible to keep in mind during a time of traumatic upheaval like our present moment in history — very few people are strictly good or irredeemably evil. Few people are undeniably good almost all the time, we think of them as highly evolved, wise, enlightened, righteous, bodhisattvas, saints. Few people are relentlessly evil, we think of them as dangerous psychopaths. All the rest of us are between these extremes, on a spectrum we move along according to our emotions. All of us are quite good sometimes, even exemplary although, when we feel victimized and completely justified, cruel, ruthless and unforgiving.
If you’re cruel and ruthless at times, does that make you an evil person? It depends on a lot of things. There is a time to be ruthless in this rough world we live in, sad to say. But as a permanent attitude, a tiny minority of us are ruthless all the time just as very few can be at our best in every moment. We aspire to be the best we can be in every moment.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said “forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a permanent attitude.” A very tall order for the average earthling, because forgiveness always depends on the specific circumstances, and a sincere apology landing just right, but it states a great aspiration — a readiness to listen and forgive, which is a beautiful thing. It requires not hardening your heart against people who have done you wrong, if they sincerely try to make amends.
Hatred and division have actually been monetized, you can buy stock in lucrative corporations (like Palantir) that specialize in mining and analyzing personal data for the use of those who seek to exploit existing prejudices and make people hate and fear each other. Personalized messages influence millions to see the “other” as inhuman and evil. AI can also easily be harnessed to this task, dividing people by removing elements like nuance and context that make humans compassionate and replacing it with relentless algorithms that make AI conform to the creators of AI’s money-driven, bottom line, black and white, good/evil worldview.
We are divided by the calculated, constantly repeated, transactional lie that some people, people like us, are good, and other people, people like them (fill in hated group) are evil. This lie is the creation of evil people, which is then magnified by millions of sometimes fine and sometimes shitty people who are neither evil nor good all the time, repeating it widely to people who agree, often just to be agreeable. The lies that enflame our division are all promoted by algorithms that monetize engagement. Engagement is driven by fear, lust, agitation, need for confirmation, isolation, anger, outrage, etc. Now fear, hatred, outrage and the lies that drive them can be instantly spread to hundreds of millions, like a pandemic.
I think of the klansman, acting out of a reflex to protect a helpless toddler, diving into a river to save a drowning child. I imagine him in that moment acting out of human instinct, not stopping to think the kid might be black or a member of some other group he hates. Maybe it’s the Anne Frank good in me, seeking the good in someone otherwise hateful to me, but I think humans defaulting to their higher human impulses happens more often than we are aware. What unites us as vulnerable humans is far more powerful than what divides us, things that are mostly lies anyway.
The genius of homo sapiens, the self-named Wise Ape, is our ability to organize on a massive level based on abstract beliefs (granted often irrational, destructive ones). No other animal is able to build cultures of millions of its own and harness that organized mass to radically change the actual planet we live on. Humans are capable of the greatest things ever done, as well as the most atrocious. Almost none of us are Good and very few of us are Evil. There has to be some path to keeping this in the front of our consciousness as we move through these dangerous times.
And there’s this:
Also today [May 5], at a meeting to announce that Washington, D.C., will host the 2027 National Football League draft, Trump confirmed that he suddenly decided to announce he was reopening Alcatraz because the word sounded strong. “It represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is uh, I would say the ultimate, right? Alcatraz. Sing Sing and Alcatraz, the movies…. Nobody’s ever escaped from Alcatraz and just represented something, uh, strong having to do with law and order. We need law and order in this country. And so we’re going to look at it. Some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that, and, uh, we had a little conversation. I think it’s gonna be very interesting. We’ll see if we can bring it back. In large form, add a lot. But I think it represents something. Right now, it’s a big hulk that’s sitting there rusting and rotting, uh, very, uh, you look at it, it’s sort of, you saw that picture that was put out. It’s sort of amazing, but it sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak. And it’s got a lot of it’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting. And I think they make a point”
I grew up in a home where incoherent positions were taken regularly by our parents during our nightly standoffs at the dinner table. I was told over the years, with no uncertainty, that at three days old I silently declared myself an implacable enemy of my innocent father. My parents, both highly intelligent and well-educated, believed this to the day they died, eighty years later. As a result of this kind of mind-numbing idiocy, from two otherwise smart people, I have a lifelong intolerance for incoherence, particularly when it is being asserted as a fact you’d better goddamned believe, because I insist it’s true.
Spirited debate is sometimes necessary to resolve a disagreement. This process is not always easy or fun. But with good faith we can often thrash out solutions to difficult problems by producing arguments that persuade the other person to consider their position from another angle. This ability to reason a way to compromise is what enables democratic government to function. It stems from mutual, if sometimes grudging, respect and a recognition of objective reality that serves as the baseline for discussion and negotiation. It is the ability to reach consensus, and the logical methods used, that tyrants attack with everything they’ve got. The main weapons of tyranny are incoherence, fear and violence.
Incoherence is absolute, rigid, brazen, unblinking, it never changes its tune. Compromise is never possible when faced with an incoherent position defended to the death. The project of those who argue incoherently is total domination. As a matter of logic, it is impossible to reason with somebody who is rigidly irrational. If they offer no proof of something baseless that they insist is true, and they insist it’s true loudly and proudly anyway, you will never find common ground on anything.
This is the dilemma we find ourselves in today as Americans. One of Charles Koch’s most respected Libertarian thinktanks, The Heritage Foundation (author of Project 2025), maintains a database of election fraud going back to 1982. The documented incidents of voter fraud comprise a microscopic, statistically insignificant fraction of all votes cast. Even Bill Barr, as despicable and bellicose a Christian hypocrite as you will find anywhere, called MAGA claims of massive voter fraud bullshit.
Still, you will hear endless claims of widespread voter fraud used to support various voter suppression schemes in every state controlled by a gerrymandered MAGA legislature. If you can’t win at the ballot box, make an incoherent, but relentless argument, about the need to defeat widespread fraud. Anyone inclined to believe that Blacks, Muslims, Asians, college students, city dwellers, college students, naturalized citizens, gay people, environmentalists, humanists, atheists, those manipulated by Jewish practitioners of the Great Replacement “theory”, enemies of the anonymous, all-seeing Q, child blood drinking pedophiles, etc. commit voter fraud in massive numbers does not need proof. That there is a database, even if it has only 1,200 cases of fraud out of a billion votes cast, is enough to convince them.
It seems to me there are two basic kinds of people in society. One needs, above all, honest, mutual conversation, they are open to changing their minds in light of new information from a trusted source. The other kind is willing to accept lies, no matter how absurd, if there is something to be gained — money, membership in a group, prestige, power, being on the “winning team” — and they tend to be rigidly faithful in their beliefs. Black and white thinking characterizes this second type, a certainty that makes logic irrelevant. This kind also demonstrates a willingness to do whatever must be done to feel part of something greater than themselves.
I’ve heard this incoherent style called the dance of rage. The part of the brain that processes logic and can put things into cause and effect sequence is disabled if the anger center is inflamed. If you need to be right, above all else, you will fight to the death with any weapon that comes to hand. You may not be able to win a debate based on what actually exists, but there’s nothing stopping you from insisting on something that clearly doesn’t exist until the other person’s head simply explodes. If you can’t make the other person’s head explode, physical violence is your next best option, provided you have the numbers on your side.
You can’t reason with someone whose mind is closed. You may be able to find common ground, with enough skill and persistence, since we are all humans and have similar basic needs. Common ground is great, but often not enough to move the needle much. When you see that someone is prepared to assert incoherent talking points in order not to be wrong, that’s a pretty good sign it’s time to smile, wink and say goodnight.
There are some people who reveal an ugly side of themselves, often at the worst time for you. You cannot unsee the ugliness of contempt once it reveals itself to you. It’s human nature to make excuses for that person, if we love them, but once an ugly pattern emerges, with the insistence that only you are to blame for any bad feelings, wishful hoping will not change the person you are making excuses for or your relationship with them.
I had a childhood friend I haven’t seen for many years at this point. He called periodically and we spoke calmly about things in our lives. The reason we don’t see each other anymore is that in spite of provoking me to anger every time we met, for years, he refused to acknowledge this, instead insisting that I have a problem with my temper.
We all have a problem when we lose our temper, but that is another story. We do not all provoke our closest friends every time we get together with them. We also don’t all reflexively fight to deny that we are doing anything bad to anybody, ever.
I urged him several times over the years, if you see me start to get upset, hear my voice tighten, see my muscles tense and my face redden, pump the brakes and let’s change the subject for a while. He doesn’t know how to do this. It’s not his problem. It is mine, as he always reminded me. So, in the end I finally did what I needed to do not to be provoked by someone who can’t help himself. I stopped pretending this handsome fish was a cuddly lapdog.
He is, sadly, unable to view his actions, and the actions of others, with the same clarity. To him we were still friends, somehow, because I took his calls and we talked on the phone once in a while. I always like talking to people, it is one of my favorite things to do.
I like comparing notes on what we’ve learned over our aging lives. He listened as I recited hard lessons I’ve had to learn. This made him feel close to me, that I was always honest with him, and talked in a relaxed, nonjudgmental way. I didn’t mind talking to him, but that’s a much different thing than us being friends.
Friends comfort each other during painful times. Friends ask good questions when they don’t understand something. Friends extend the benefit of the doubt when the other one is off kilter, gently find out what’s wrong, how they can help. Friends accept responsibility when they hurt their friend. Friends make sure that ill-feelings do not fester in their dear ones. Friends are responsive, and honest, when a friend expresses unhappiness with the way things are.
Not all friendships can always be saved, though some can. No friendship can be saved if one friend is always blamed for any conflict, unless the blamed person is a masochist.
If I tell you a sad story of death, with a terrible lesson I reluctantly had to learn, and you reply that it was a beautiful story of life, with an inspiring lesson that is the opposite of the lesson I described, what can I possibly say, without being dishonest, that will make us friends again?
I have been forced, over the last couple of years, to accept that there are people utterly incapable of compromise. When you are in a relationship with one of these folks, often called narcissists, and find yourself in any kind of conflict with them, your choice is accepting their blame-shifting terms, and all blame, or getting the hell away from them. Many of us have come to recognize and understand this destructive personality type in recent years. They see the world in black and white, win/lose, and are compelled, by a gnawing terror of humiliation, to act as they act. They are incapable of real self-knowledge, vulnerability or change.
As a result of constant bombardment by an angry, entitled, mentally unstable, destructive MAGA president, and his hand-picked loyalists, we have all learned, along with the dark, neutral, meaning-obscuring term “transactional”, the term “malignant narcissist”, a psychologist’s post-World War Two explanation of evil. Though a diagnosis of malignant narcissism is not found in the DSM, psychiatry’s bible of diagnostic categories, its workings can be easily observed in the real world. It describes a megalomaniac so intent on dominating others that they will do anything, including violent intimidation and mass murder, to be the most important human on the planet.
In 2022 “gaslighting” was Merriam-Webster’s (famous longtime dictionary) word of the year. It was the word of the year because it described what is being done to the American public, constantly, by a powerful group intent on absolute power and completely unbound from any sort of ethical restraints. Gaslighting is, according to Merriam-Webster:
psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator
But in recent years, we have seen the meaning of gaslighting refer also to something simpler and broader: “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage.” In this use, the word is at home with other terms relating to modern forms of deception and manipulation, such as fake news, deepfake, and artificial intelligence.
When our president and his acolytes practice this technique, and demonstrate every other trait of the narcissist, and no consequences befall them, it empowers anyone inclined to act this way to pull out all the stops. Destructive behavior is normalized, as we say, and suddenly angry drivers feel free to blow through traffic lights as civility itself becomes a vulnerability.
Gaslighting is a major technique of the narcissist. You can’t be right because I have a perfectly good explanation, very convincing, for why you are wrong, insane, deluded, crazy, dangerous, a threat and I am your innocent victim, who loves you very much. Narcissist, I think, was also a recent word of the year, I may be wrong but I’m too lazy to keep searching. There is much on-line opinion that the term is overused. In any case, narcissism is the new N-word. It describes a person so damaged early in life that they construct a superficially confident, brittle, grandiose public persona that can never be wrong, attacks when criticized, blames others exclusively and will fight to the death over any conflict. One of their chief weapons of attack is gaslighting.
Our best hope as humans is avoiding assholes who act this way and practicing mutual vulnerability in our personal lives. This allows us and our loved ones to make human mistakes without immediately hunkering down into kill or be killed mode, as is the narcissist’s reflexive reaction. It is an open question how long it takes to recover from a narcissist’s abuse, full recovery may be elusive if you’ve been subjected to it long enough. On the other hand, the only way forward is through healing, and part of healing is learning to protect yourself from this type, once your antennae is attuned to the clear warning signs of someone who is so perfect that they will kill anyone who says otherwise.
I described my mother as someone with intermittent empathy. She could be very empathetic but she could also be completely oblivious to what other people needed or wanted. How, the therapist asked, can someone be intermittently empathetic?
My mother was beaten down by her mother. An only child, raised by a talented, demanding, strong-willed mother whose entire family had been murdered in Ukraine when my mother was fifteen, she bore the brunt of her mother’s sorrows, terrors and frustrations. Her father was sympathetic, but also dominated by my grandmother, he could only do so much to protect his daughter. My mother clearly grew up with a lot of pain and anger she constantly had to push down. As a result she had a very low threshold for frustration and flew into anger very easily.
My father had it even worse than my mother. His mother, a tiny, religious maniac famous for her uncontrollable temper, literally whipped him in the face from the time he could stand. On his deathbed my father finally acknowledged the damage this had done to him. “My life was basically over by the time I was two,” he said in a raspy, dying man’s voice.
When my father flew into a rage my mother was always quick to join in. It is, I understand now, a primitive, childish reaction, the same one that animates any lynch mob. Another person’s righteous rage, forcefully expressed, gives you permission to vent your own righteous, often inchoate, anger. As a child I was regularly exposed to this tour de force tag team of parental immaturity. There was little I could do, during an onslaught, outside of telling them both to fuck off. This response, of course, made their anger all the more righteous and me all the more deserving of it.
Intermittent empathy works like this. Hours after the bloody conflict, when my mother was calm, and by herself, I’d sometimes be able to present my side of the most recent dinner table battle. I’d lay out what happened from my point of view. She would listen. Sometimes I’d be able to persuade her that I’d been treated unfairly. When I was able to get my mother’s understanding, I felt her empathy. I have to believe that this intermittent empathy probably saved me from my sister’s fate. My sister, never really having experienced either of our parents’ empathy, until late in life when our father became her chief ally and emotional and financial supporter, became exactly the dreaded parent that tormented and damaged her as a child.
I had a close friend, call him Flack. He often expressed his torment at how difficult it was to get empathy or support from his superficially charming wife, call her Gina. He told me many times, with a lot of emotion, how humiliating it was to have to beg for things from a life partner who should give him those things without being asked.
Empathy, of course, is at the top of the list of what each of us needs from our intimates. I’ve learned, since my execution at Gina’s orders, that Gina is an extreme case, probably a psychopath in her need to be right no matter what and her uncontrollable desire for maximum punishment of anyone who makes her feel wrong. Flack, it turns out, is the classic vulnerable narcissist, he will do anything for anybody at any time, even strangers, and he is heroic in these public efforts, but he is vigilant and quick to rage at anyone who might notice his rigid need to be seen as perfect.
No human has ever been perfect of course, but if you are damaged enough to believe you must be perfect, it’s probably impossible to recover from that. Empathy for the imperfections of others as a first reflex is ideal. I tell you I’m hurt, you ask me why. You listen, show you understand why I’m hurt. Then you can talk about the intricacies of the situation, propose solutions, etc. Empathy ideally comes first. It is the hallmark of our healthiest, most life-sustaining relationships. In my experience, with most people, empathy is often intermittent, as my mother’s was.
People are self-centered, defensive, distracted, react with solutions before they hear the problem, want to fix things before they know what’s broken. We are humans, puny earthlings. Still, empathy that has to be prompted by a clear, calm presentation, is infinitely better than what my old friend Flack has to contend with — token empathy conditioned on absolute obedience to the will of someone with very little empathy.
Given the choice, we’d all like empathy without having to ask for it. Also given the choice, real empathy we can elicit from someone else is infinitely preferable to the situation Flack finds himself in. With a mate incapable of empathy he is always required to peevishly beg for it, which he finds humiliating.
This eternal, reflexive humiliation leaves him angry much of the time, performing a lonely dance of brittle perfection. The only time he feels intimately connected to this woman he has bound himself to is when he is vindicating her honor by cutting off the head of an old friend she now insists is a deadly enemy. They are never closer than when he is manfully serving her need for revenge. For me, even the spottiest intermittent empathy beats that irresolvable fucking tragedy every day of the week.
There are two different forms of anger, one saves your life, the other destroys it in the end. The life-saving form of anger has an evolutionary/survival purpose. Suddenly flooded with adrenaline, cortisol and who knows what other miracle substances, you explode in a show of threat to scare off something that is threatening you. This anger, when successful in keeping you safe, is followed by relief. The flight or fight chemicals in your bloodstream dissipate and you go about your business. There is another kind of anger that is extremely dangerous to our bodies, our lives and the lives of those around us. This shapeshifting anger lingers, keeps your body coursing with fight or flight chemicals, which do great harm over time. This kind of anger is always ready to leap out when enflamed, often is not aimed at an appropriate threat, can’t be calmed, does not dissipate when the threat is warded off because the threat, which is internal, is never gone.
Anger that makes someone back off when they are in your face and unable to control their aggravating emotional reaction is good anger, anger necessary for survival, it makes the immediate pain stop. It doesn’t need to stick around after it has done its job. Seedj and I have expressed this kind of anger regularly to each other, especially during these recent hellishly aggravating weeks, when we have stepped over some line in our mutual pain and frustration and angered each other. Anger is not easy, not pretty, not clean but it is sometimes necessary, and when it is, if understanding and reconciliation follow as soon as possible, no harm is done. You can learn valuable lessons from another person’s explanation of what made them angry, learn to do better. Anger is particularly common when personal stress is running high, and aggravated by external events in the larger world, where, at the moment, every corporation and institution appears to be lining up, and ponying up big bucks to Dear Leader, to fund the gold-plated, gloriously violent MAGA swastika revenge parade that America’s greediest, along with the stupidest, angriest and most violent, are all spoiling for.
The anger that kills is the building set of grievances that gather, linger and are endlessly swallowed after occasional bitter complaining, constant passive-aggression, or violence, achieving nothing to resolve any of the causes. This inchoate anger is the unresolvable, constantly recurring, self-fueling anger that creates every cripplingly painful health problem Dr. John Sarno talks about. It has no end, is tangled in a self-hatred and self-blame that can never be surmounted, so it also kills relationships, including the crucial one with the self.
Make no mistake, and you certainly don’t need me to remind you of this, life provides each one of us with steady doses of various kinds of pain. Today mine is mostly located in my urinary tract, aggravated by a coudé catheter placed after a surgery it seems unlikely I needed in the first place (with a second catheter inserted in an ER after 7 stressful hours straining to urinate the next evening after removing the first). It is day four of the catheter and piss bag, and I must say, it is uncomfortable, occasionally painful and a fucking drag in many different ways.
There are all kinds of pain. Every kind of pain is made worse by enflamed emotions. The realization that the pain we are suffering, the result of someone else’s thoughtlessness, is unnecessary, could have been easily prevented had we not misplaced our trust, is maybe the most tormenting thing we can learn about our pain. In the hours after leaving the ER the other night I was in a rage against the negligent, confident, smiling surgeon who’d done no tests, relying on tests done by a prior sociopath who had done no tests either, before forging ahead blindly with surgery under general anesthesia. I sincerely wanted to punch his lights out. This rage certainly made the physical pain I was experiencing much worse.
I have found, and I confirmed this again the other day, that sitting in a quiet place and writing out a schematic of what is going on, explaining it to yourself as simply and directly as you can, as if you were talking to a sympathetic friend, can give substantial relief from the emotional part of pain.
My initial angry writing was a torrent of what happened to me as a result of a ten minute surgery I spent 14 hours in the hospital for (4 of them in the ER correcting the painful condition I was left with), why it was all so gratuitous, and inexcusable, and disrespectful, and avoidable and sickening and fucked up. That menu of gristly details went on for a few pages. I then emailed my cousin, an expert in medical malpractice, and briefly laid out my case for a breach of the legal standard of care that a doctor, even in a soul-dead corporate medical culture like ours, owes to a patient. These writings gave me slight relief, to have the ugly details set out on paper.
It was the following day, when my anger had cooled slightly, along with the inflammation of my abused urinary tract, which had been torn by the “non-invasive” procedure (first do no harm), that I was able to distill the pain down to the principle of trust. Much of the pain I was feeling was about a violation of trust. What is trust, how do we know when we can trust somebody, what do we do when someone proves they can’t be trusted? Turning to these philosophical questions, illustrated with details of two lying, defensive, unethical doctors who blamed their patient for their own inattention to the patient’s best interest, reduced my anger by a substantial margin. I felt much better after writing this.
Writing that gave me a better frame to look at my current frustrating situation through. This same analysis can be applied to many things in our current world, where liars are frequently rewarded with great power and those who cling to the truth are seen as somehow weak and contemptible. We don’t need to make an explicit connection to a corrupt and threatening new status quo to consider the basic question, an important one for everyday life: how do we know when we can trust somebody?
I have to say, in passing, that a new detail installed by WordPress on a page they no longer support (this particular design), the automatic, intermittently undefeatable “group blocks,” makes editing almost impossible once you’ve gone on to the next paragraph. I will have to go over this again on my phone to make it more clear, and the thought of that extra step makes my irritated urethra clench a bit. What is it with these fucking tech bro motherfuckers, who know better than any of us what features we want suddenly disabled, what new inconveniences coders like Big Balls will insert into formerly useful apps to make us appreciate their dull genius even more than we already do? I see now that there are three dots that can be clicked on, in addition to the normal options for formatting, and one of the options in that second pulldown menu is “ungroup”, which allows editing, but it took me weeks to discover that fix of something that wasn’t broken before in any way (and the fix of their new ‘improvement’ doesn’t work every time, as it happens). Nazi fucks.
Anyway, my point here is to underscore how helpful it can be to sit and sift through aggravations, with as few distractions as possible, and by writing and clarifying, readjust your perspective. The expression of your point of view, and the knowledge that you have set it out plainly and understandably, provides that crucial feeling of being heard, if only by yourself. If you need to explain it to someone else, you have a link you can send them, and the confidence that they will grasp what is eating you and why it is reasonable that you are feeling in the hands of cannibals.
At the moment there’s no medication I can take for the discomfort and intermittent pain of having this irritating catheter in my body, strapped to a piss bag I’m constantly having to drain. There is a kind of self-healing in laying out the good reasons for my anger and considering how to protect myself from anything like this ever being done to me again, no matter how adept the smiling psychopath is in presenting it as my best and least invasive option for curing a medical ill.
I recommend it to you, my invisible friend, as an exercise that can go a long way in self-soothing. Once you get yourself into the habit, it becomes a fairly straightforward path to partial pain relief. In the context of severe pain, I have learned, partial relief is nothing to sneeze at. Whatever practice you can develop for calming the enflamed emotions that accompany all pain is helpful. Try writing for a few minutes the next time you can’t get the thought of smashing someone’s smug face out of your mind. If it reduces your pain by 30%, you can give yourself a gentle, loving pat on the back.
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