The man under the railway bridge

There is a man who lives under the railway bridge leading to the busy high street.

All of his possessions are pushed against a wall and his mattress takes up about a third of the walkway. Curiously I was thinking yesterday that if it were me, I would put the mattress against the wall and my things as a kind of barrier. But maybe they would blow away or be kicked by passers by.

The man under the railway bridge has no safety barrier around him when he sleeps. You can look in on him, down from a bus window or directly there. He has no defences against other people’s eyes, no separation or privacy from the outside world.

The fumes from the buses must be poisoning him and the harsh outdoor weather slowing draining him and the light pollution denying him true rest and recovery.

What must have befallen such a person to lead them to this situation? I cannot know what he thinks or feels, whether he is fleeing something, whether he would rather be out there than in some place worse. But I cannot imagine it being a good situation.

If he is a musician he cannot keep his guitar in good order, if he is a baker he cannot work his hands on the dough, if he is a athlete he can’t keep his fitness high, if he is a teacher he cannot order his mind or keep to a schedule.

Whatever this man may have been, he is in a place where that potential is not realized. Somewhere along the way, enough people have failed him and the system has failed to catch him – or deliberately let him fall.

I hope the man who lives under the railway bridge is picked up by the two great, warm hands of society and given walls to protect himself, refind himself, counsellors to talk him through whatever needs to be spoken or just to be there in moments of desperation and friends enough to give him something to live for.

I hate this callous system, its economics and its deranged values. Those at the very ‘top’ must have gouged-out hearts and atrophied souls to allow for, or even cause, so much suffering both to their fellow man and to nature itself.  It must be a heavy burden on them, all that power, all that real suffering they cause.

That is the real tragedy here – all that suffering is for nothing. It does not teach our souls or take us on some spiritual journey. There are people who are forced to suffer, it is immoral and it needs to stop.

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Don’t trust everyone

At the start of my crisis, and before it, I tended to be quite open about my mental health. Now I will not even tell people who know me that I have therapy – I just tell them I am having non-descript ‘sessions’.

There is something about this discretion and lessening of trust which is building me up as an individual with his own power. I have more power over my boundaries than I thought.

Life taught me not to be too trusting. I honestly believe that gains in my own power have come from this with-holding; as if whenever you give yourself too cheaply your subconscious swallows a nasty draught of something toxic and self-negating. And everytime you give trust to the wrong person, you end up with a dagger to the heart and a dark wound. I will not let this happen to me again.

You don’t have to trust someone you do not know. You don’t have to help someone you do not know. You don’t have to trust your parents or your siblings. You don’t have to trust the authorities. You don’t have to trust anyone.

Of course, trust is a vital and beautiful thing. In Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Saga, ultimate trust is demonstrated by revealing your ‘true name’ to someone, giving them total power over your being. If your true name falls into the wrong hands, you are fucked. But you can offer ultimate trust to another sentient human being with it, and if they reveal theirs to you, you have communed with another on the most fundamental and beautiful way possible.

Without this trust-giving, we are isolate, and isolation is just as much a destroyer as naive openness. We have an imperative to escape our isolation, it is in our nature to. We are all individuals, and this is where liberty stems from, but no man is an island.

I cannot trust the sea of humanity anymore, but I can trust my tried and tested crew, or communities I have come to know. And of course I can trust myself.

 

No work, no home, no woman.

It sounds like it could be a blues song, but it is real life. And its mine.

No work, no home, no woman.

I can self-deceive only for short bursts of time. This has been a hard and sorry life.

Even with great progress made on some fronts (why do you think I ain’t been postin’? When things get good I don’t write about how good it is – I just get on with it!) Things can fall down like a house of cards. Things are so fucking frail. Things don’t really go anywhere when you are in the belly of the beast.

It feels like you have moved forward, but this could be conscious deception. The depths are where your true meaning lies, and shifting that perception is like moving a mountain stone by stone.  Something inside is timeless. It can’t be outrun, and it doesn’t move with ideals of progress. It is just there.

I am more familiar with this deep, dark pulse. Every massive leap into the unknown I know I can come out of the other end swinging and somewhat intact. But this is to be dragged from battle to battle, with no promise of a castle to rest in at the end of it.

This is no way to live.

Its no way for anyone to live. But there isn’t much ‘live’ after this.

Our generation has been shat on and shat on and shat on. Any of us with any semblance of conscience have no choice. This is the life we have live, to live.

That is why I ain’t got no work, no home and no woman.

There is no work that is worth doing except for the fight; the system is collapsing. There is no home to shelter in; the world is crumbling. Perhaps the only consolation in life could be to love woman, but the above factors and an extra helping of fucked-up don’t go down too well with them.

This is why I have found massive affinity with early Tolkien, namely his ‘Germanic myth’ stories. The characters go through endless tragic shit, and often die at the end of it, victorious but completely destroyed. These are more true to life than Hollywood’s bullshite mythos, with its bullshite characters.

Even the darkest of films has nothing on Turin Turumbar. Now that was a fucked up life. He had no home (he had to leave very early on), no work (other than fighting Morgoth from the age he could hold a blade) and we won’t even go into the last one.

 

 

 

The power of dreams

I have started to come into full connection with my dream-self. This means the habit of journaling dreams, but also on a deeper level, trying to understand them. I am far from an ‘expert’ in why we dream and what it all means, but I do not propose to provide solid answers. The subject matter seems too ethereal for that. I wish only to journal my thoughts and express what I believe; perhaps you will find commonality there or can help me realize what they are all about!

There is a logic in dreams, one that cannot be discerned from the light-world of reason and conscious decision. It is so easy to ask ‘how does this fit into my narrative? What is it trying to show me?’ I am now asking ‘what is the logic of the dream-world; is there one at all?’

I am believe two things of two things. Firstly that dreams are not meaningless. It is laughably arrogant to think so – as if the conscious mind alone can find its own significance; as if a being can ignore its very primal creative power and expect to know anything of itself! I believe our dreams to be visions from the unconscious mind, a ‘spiritual’ guide. If anything, it is the contextless, socially-shackled conscious mind that is more prone to meaninglessness – as this part of us alone can be subverted and truncated; there is no escaping the truth of our dreams, for without sleep we cannot live, and without dreams our sleep is poor.

Secondly, I am sure that dreams  are not just suppressed desires. This may be a part of a dream’s expression, but I do not believe for a second that a dream is just the ‘id’ trying to reach the surface. This is a very crude explanation for our dreams, and it feels intuitively wrong.

There is something far more powerful, far more primordial to the dream than that. I feel the symbolism of the dream is linking me to something universal – even if I am the only dreamer and my dreams are about me as an individuated incarnation, the themes and the symbols and the language of the dream have been absorbed by the world outside them.

My approach is to be patient with these dreams, to recognise the themes and try to understand their language. It is not enough to just write about it and analyse it from afar, and it can be dogmatic to turn to a dictionary of dream imagery for our answers (for instance, to think that lions always represent fear, or fire represents change or chaos! Its so trite!)

What I believe we must do is try to become the symbolism, try to embody it to connect to this deep part of ourselves. To journal carefully and recognise themes, places we keep going back to, people we keep on seeing. On the same patch of green space near to where I once lived I have dreamed of totem poles, of little English estate kids who resembled monkeys, of a camp of hippies and eco-warriors right on my front doorstep, of jungle-like long grass and a sense of emptiness. Is it a vision of past, present or a prediction of the future? I have to work that out myself.

Is this a pure expression of our spiritual aspect? Our direct connection to the world which created us and generates us? 

What I will end with is the incredible creative power of dreams. Spontaneously they can create the most complex systems an environments. Last night I dreamt I was listening to a song on the TV – the dreams devised the chords and lyrics, and they were great! Sadly I could not remember it at all. I also tend to dream of  reaching impossible train lines where the stations have ridiculous jibberish names. I cannot remember a single one of them! Sometimes the names are more plausible, but still random creations of the dream mind. Imagine consciously coming up with thirty station names, how much effort it would take. Now imagine trying to bring them all into conscious focus simultaneously – that it seems is what my dream-mind does (unless it is generating them at some earlier point in the dream or in waking life, but isn’t that just even more incredible, that it can create a dream to exist in and prepare the next parts!)

All of this is spontaneous – this is what makes it so unbelievably incredible. Our dream minds generate entire complex worlds and characters, impossibly vibrant colours and combinations, without the slightest effort.

I will never take this deep world for granted again, I promise. Every detail I can remember will be written down – you never know what is relevant, and what is just beautiful chaos.

Listen to that deepest impulse

I don’t know how long this will go on for. I don’t know if it will ever be healed or go away, if it will let me live as other people do. I cannot give any guarantees to myself, or to anyone.

No amount of ‘sleep hygiene’ can guarantee a dreamful night. Positive thinking and mindfulness is not going to achieve much more than temporarily helping to cope – at worst it divorces you from your own being. All the new found things, breakthroughs in ‘gut health’, yoga and all that, is not the ticket.

All you can do for sure is listen to that deep impulse, let it manifest in you. It is you, you are not separate from it. Being aware of it will not fulfil it, there is no ‘pure consciousness’ which can perceive back upon itself. When a child cries do you tell them to be ‘aware’ of the reason why they are crying and expect them to be ok with that? I should hope not! You would listen to why they are crying and try to deal with the cause, to soothe their fears if they are unfounded and provide their needs if they are unfulfilled.

Likewise we cannot turn off or turn away from the manifestation of our deep impulses, our deepest pain. For me it manifests as insomnia and discomforting states. They can wipe me out, destroying a routine, disabling me.

But I have stopped using Valium to guarantee me a dreamless night’s rest. If I cannot make it to something the next day, unless it is extremely important, I have to accept I cannot make it. I will listen to the body-wisdom, even in its most debilitating states. This is the only long-term way to move forward.

Actually listening, playing out subconscious movements in the dark, holding the deep wounds and acknowledging them tends to work for me. It lets me rest, it fades into the background. It might never go away, but the more I can deal with it and accept it, the more confident I become that I will never again fall into a total abyss.

Adapting to cope or thrive in this society is not a way to be healthy and true – I have seen how brutalizing it is to those around me. It is an illusion and a sad one. We must fight to transform the world we live in, allow people to live out their pain and be dormant whenever they need to be. Wounded adults will never bring about a peaceful, enlightened society. Ignorant, power-hungry fools know not even themselves – how can they know anything of the world around them.

What would it mean to transcend your own self and be able to function despite the screams of your soul? It would be to live inauthentically, something capitalism demands of us. The destructiveness of our society results from such detachment. It is all around us, and it is all because we are afraid of nature in its truest and nearest manifestation: in ourselves.

When you next lay awake at 3am, unable to sleep, tossing and turning, rather than try to wipe yourself out with pills ask: what is this deepest impulse trying to tell me? Why is my body on strike, what is trying to come to the surface…

 

Depression – breaking it all down (Part I)

I am not one of those people who believes that depression is all about thought processes, behaviour and ‘life style’. It is something far more deep reaching and fundamental than that. You cannot think your way out of depression, just as you cannot think your way into it.

However, I still see the important role of thinking in keeping you there once you are there and the dreaded making a bad situation seem worse!

Depression for me makes all the bad things seem inevitable and the source of the bad things far more powerful than it truly is. It is like a wall of despair, a vast amorphous barrier, so tall you cannot possibly see over, or around it. But when we focus in on this behemoth, we see that it is made up of individual components, and our perspective is that of someone hunched, low and defeated.

Stand up to your full height and the wall, whilst still imposing, is not so large. Focus in, and though you will see the strength of your enemy, the weak points also reveal themselves.

Breaking it all down –

My new direction is to break it all down in my mind; to dispel this mythic image of an undefeatable, invincible, inevitable foe. I know that the hostility of capitalist society is a very real thing, not just an imagined enemy. But lets use our imagination too break it down into realistic components.

Nature is being destroyed by the machine, but cracks in the pavement are full of life, chopped down trees unexpectedly sprout a thousand branches, certain species thrive even in this era of mass extinction. In ten years time an abandoned neighbourhood will become a wild garden, in a hundred it will become a grove, in a thousand there will be nothing left of it, strangled and hidden by thriving life. Nature is going no-where, and it is never far from regeneration. This ancient thing is more resilient than us, and we will always live in its beautiful shadow.

The officials who keep the machine running, do they truly believe in what they are doing? Would they not rather be pursuing some goal more true to themselves, spending time with their children, resolving emotions they have repressed, exploring and finding themselves? The amount of coercion and brainwashing needed to keep people in their place to blunt their true dreams and ambitions is proof positive that most people, even those in positions of power, are themselves led along and trapped by the madness of civilization. The lack of self-knowledge and true ambition, this is a reason to pity the machine-servants, hypnotized by digital screens, life void of meaning but for the targets from above and the will of invisible figures more powerful than themselves.

Advertising is everywhere, shallow, crass, idiotic pleas for conformity. But there is nothing democratic about advertising; it is there, but who wants it there but the sad corporations trying to control our choices? No one is really taken in on a conscious-level; eyes are rolled on the tube, people take the piss out of the sell-out celebrities, a bad pun elicits a long groan. Deep down, a subconscious lever may have been triggered, a greater sense of dissatisfaction and desire to go on holiday to ‘discover life in Greece’ (or whatever). But this is again an affliction – how many of us would vote to give powerful corporations thousands upon thousands of square metres of space to try and influence our decisions? The ubiquity of advertising only demonstrates how fucked up property and power is in our society, not the democratic will of the people. Some of the more idiotic populace might find advertising interesting or be consciously duped by its bullshittery, what can be done for such a hopeless minority?

It can be a loveless existence suffering from mental illness. You are vulnerable and need to be loved more than most people, but that same vulnerability makes trusting others difficult, and that same hurt makes you less desirable. The lack of strength and stability is a massive turn off. Month after month of failure and rejection makes the chances of finding a woman who is interested seem less and less likely, a feedback loop of frustration and disappointment. But all this doesn’t make things impossible, only more difficult. The spiral down into despair is one that is hard to avoid here; it is informed by the deep subconscious wounds and triggers of childhood, but it is not inevitable. Am I totally helpless and disadvantaged by this depression and anxiety? Everything to do with this mental illness and the abuse of the past makes the whole sphere of love much harder for me. Still, the act of breaking down how mental illness is contributing to isolation and lack of love dispels the mist, promotes understanding. It is the gargantuan wall which leads to despair, not the individual bricks. Maybe through understanding things will change and improve, though I cannot promise this to myself or anyone else. At least they cannot get any worse. Going from things are hopeless to who knows what can happen, I will have no judgements is a massive luxury for me at the moment. Neutrality – feeling neither loved or unloved, does not feel so bad.

End of Part I

It all falls apart…

I have always known of the entropic nature of things. Things naturally decay, wear away and fall apart.

From the earliest age it is possible to be sentient, I was. I was quickly made aware that the world is full of violence and danger, and immediately had to adapt to survive in that world.

I never had a good ‘take off’ into this world. From day one, I had to endure and survive violent, demeaning abuse at the hands of a non-father figure. His vile words were just as powerful in destroying my sense of good, justice and worth as his chaotic beatings.

So I have been under no pretentions about this world, and the sheer scale of evil and injustice in it. I never fell from grace or lost my faith, because it was never there to begin with. I know chaos and violence, for I have felt it with my own senses.

The nature of the world, if you put it in flowery euphemistic language, is change. But if you are brutally honest with yourself, it is entropy. Things fall apart, break down, collapse and die. They do not flourish forever, they fade and lose their colour. Even good things collapse, the best King imaginable will die, his castle crumble, his benevolent Empire subverted.

I am actually at terms with this reality, and I do not lament it. There is still space for some good to occur in life, to meet some good people, and achieve some moments of happiness. It is worth making the whole of your ‘journey’ before you naturally perish, life is not all sadness and misery.

What I am sad about is the sheer pace of entropy in my own life. Things fall apart quickly, they unravel before they are complete. Looking back at this year, it is unravelling and collapsing at a high rate. Much of what I achieved is dissipating. I have left a growing community I was part of, suddenly feeling the need to leave and cut myself off it. None of the relationships with women I pursued came to anything; those rose-lined paths led to dead-ends every time, walls of coldness which did not answer to my humanity. The band I helped to hold together was too much of a burden for my lacking energy, so I must let everyone down before we have really had a chance. Maybe some of those strands can be picked up again along the line, maybe not.

It seems that my lacking, brutalized core makes any sort of stable foundation impossible. Solid, lasting achievement, long-term relationships, these things seem intuitively difficult for to get to. Lack of confidence or openly feeling worthless is pointing towards a life of alienation and celibacy. It repulses others and denies trust, as well as crippling me and forcing me to let go of what I hold onto. It isn’t the only part of me, there is much that is loyal and good and strong, but the darkness is a strong one which emerges like a demon at the most inopportune times.

I know everything falls apart eventually, nothing is forever. But if only it did not collapse into entropy so fast.

What hasn’t dissipated or decayed is a deeply felt sense of injustice, of being wronged and violated. All of my songcraft and wordcraft is about it, all of my creativity channelled into understanding and expressing these sentiments.  This could possibly be the strongest thing I ever feel in my life, greater than any love or achievement or anything. I only need to imagine where I could have been if not for this deformity and disability, a past of violence and shame, to feel that this sense of being wronged is justified. And to imagine a society which was not so demeaning to people of colour, and so callous toward its ‘poor’. Imagine if I had enablement and privilege, the kind of which I see in the closest people around me, what I could have done with it with all this creativity and resourcefulness.

In Winter 2016 it all fell apart and I had to start again. It was a painful process, and on balance has led me nowhere better – just somewhere different. Now again, not two years on, I have to repeat something similar.

I am getting old enough to realize my patterns now, to know what I can and cannot depend on. The eventual decay of all-things is still there, hanging over us all like a spectre. Perhaps the one consolation is that I can always be ready for it, and laugh in its face as it laughs in mine when it comes to our final meeting.

The worst thing about disability…

My difficulties are compounded, the spiral leads downwards.

A lack of energy or confidence > Inability to socialize > Depression > Low mood and energy.

A mental health disability is hidden inside. You can’t see it – people assume you are a ‘normal person’, expected to cope with what everyone else copes with.

But most people do not have to cope with the compounded factors of mental health disability. To deal with those, traumas, collapses, indignities, poverty and the hostility of a sick government institution or capitalist work place… it doesn’t seem possible.

It is like gazing up at an immense wall when you are already bleeding, wounded and tired.

All of these compounded factors themselves compound into a living hell of frustration, and of course the tingle of despair that leads you back into depression. The cause of mental illness is psycho-logical and obvious.

Mental illness has left my confidence all but broken. Project after project starting, gaining momentum, then going nowhere. Lack of social skills or confidence makes moving forward extremely difficult, internal collapse leads to outer collapse, it all falls into a pointless fucking heap. So many people have no one to support them, and some times I am one of them.

This isn’t to say it is impossible to make it, to be loved, to be independent and useful. But it is much harder. For some it is too hard.

Not everyone has the same personal history, so why are we expected to be equals in the machine? That expectation and all the self-righteousness that comes with it, from all the mindless workers and their masters – that is what destroys my confidence every day.

Some people brutalized me a long time ago and now huge gaps have been left in my memory, where trauma has turned past events into one long, dark blur. Who will account for this, who will care about it enough to try and mitigate it and give me a fighting chance?

Much of my energy is spent staying afloat, in not drowning. There is no way to fake this – you can see the effects on a person, the worklessness and lovelessness and hopelessness.

No one would choose this.

 

The Alienated Man (finds his home)

I am not alone.

Naturally alienation goes hand to hand with isolation, but it is not true.

I am feeling the extent of my socialization, how far I have fallen into the pit.

The malaise inside me, the toxic poison, is spread far and wide.

It is one thing to know it intellectually, but this is still an isolating experience. The intellect is in me, I go round and round in it.

But after reading the ‘manifesto’ of another alienated young man, I really started to feel that is was not just about me.

Low self-esteem, sexual frustration, humiliation, abuse, neglect, isolation, no belonging, no tribe, no purpose… this is the life of a lone outcast. It is the promise of a painful, lonely, unfortunate life.

Attraction to someone, romantic or otherwise, is not purely an individual matter. It depends on being identified with a tribe or community. The alienated male is the ultimate outsider, he doesn’t belong to anything. This is what repulses people from him, not necessarily his own character. But alienation is all he knows, the sweet sense of belonging given or earned by others not yet his, or not enough to nullify the dangerous darkness and resentment bred by wasted, lonely years.

Not all alienations are the same. I feel much distance from other alienated males, who often see no further than their own shadow. My alienation is partly productive – a distancing from a sick and destructive society, and the evils of patriarchy. I am glad I do not fit in, to a degree. This does not make my alienation healthy or righteous – I am yet to find my tribe, the collective that will enable real change and real struggle to happen.

But perhaps I, as a total ‘loser’ in the eyes of society, am perfectly equipped to engage with questions of alienation, drag myself out of this dark pit and maybe encourage others to do so also.

It really feels like I am finally going somewhere, coming to realize the patterns which have caged me. I want to scream and lash out – not to hurt people, but certainly to express the power of my feeling to those who are doing the hurting!

If only men could express themselves more freely and without guilt, how much less suicide and murder there would be. If only we put the blame where it truly lay, upon the shoulders of patriarchal giants who watch us ‘lesser’ beings be destroyed at their feet, who laugh and humiliate down at us. If only we dared challenge the polite society which allows people to fall through the net, distributes wealth and opportunity unequally, disconnects us from the world, ruled by insanely short-termist, stupid bickering politicians and nihilistic businessmen. When there is an explosion of violence or a suicide, these motherfuckers have blood on their hands.

It is no law of the universe that a percentile of men will be fucked up, alienated and vulnerable. We can have a society far less violent and far less deranged if we wanted it. Perhaps people are afraid of the void, of realizing how pointless their labours are, afraid to aspire to anything better than the nihilism of spiritually dead capitalism.  But by daring the dark tunnel of truth we can come out into a world better than this one.

That is to all the people who said I was a cynic all these years! The ‘cynicism’ was necessary to break chains, now I am free, terrifyingly free, to dive deep into myself and the cosmos and emerge, flawed and never-complete, but still empowered enough to howl in rage at the prison we have created for ourselves, and howl for freedom for all.

The unimaginative masses who couldn’t see beyond capitalism, the underachievers who conform to earthly power for fleeting pleasures, the unambitious workers who gave up their dreams to step onto the treadmill and escape themselves – the multiplication of all these short-fallings is the slow death of the world itself! Just ask the climate scientists, and just look at the dispossessed figures on every high street.

But I do not want to paint a dark picture of gloom, because I do not believe it! There are lots of good people out there, good people with good hearts striving for the right kind of change.  Connecting with them is the short-term solution to alienation, and together with them we can build the long-term solution of post-capitalist society.

The alienated, frustrated, lost and lonely male need not be so for long. He can mature, challenge the misogyny around him for something uplifting and magnanimous, he can find the love he seeks once he dares look deeply into himself, learns to laugh at his contradiction, sees women as human beings rather than ‘angels and whores’, realizes that sex and power is not an elixir of self-completion. He does not need to compare himself to ‘alpha’ males or entitled, enabled white middle-class this, that and the others. We can free ourselves from these ‘ideals’ whenever we want, for those ideals are based on an othering, and othering is always a violent affair. Only the most malicious of humanity who benefit from othering and trampling others might want such a system – fuck them!

Two fingers up at the patriarchy, and then a hammer for its heart!

Lets go back into our feminism and our socialism, but also remember that an advocacy for men is necessary and nothing to be guilty for, so long as it avoids the landmine strewn hells of misogyny which stain this movement for recognition. Men need advocacy and can learn much from (the saner-strains of) feminism!

We can rise again! Alienation is just a passing phase, belonging awaits all creatures of nature and spirit, which we inevitably are.

There might always be some void inside us, some capacity to feel alienation and distance from the world around us. I believe this to be a painfully necessary evolutionary adaptation, to prevent society from solidifying too much, or going fucking insane without anyone to say ‘hold on, this is fucked, lets change it’. And further, I believe that like all creatures of the cosmos we face a nature of beauty but also terror, and that all beings experience some degree of naturally occurring coldness and anxious void at our ambivalent situation.

But the great void cannot be endured forever, we need to get a hold on it and regulate it. Cynicism and distance are necessary but must be tempered with intimacy, the intimacy we all need as bio-spiritual creatures.

My own days of alienation must come to an end!

Why?

Why were my childhood years destroyed by two abusive guardians?

Why do I have to deal with regular self-esteem collapse?

Why do I have to shut down and monitor suicidal thoughts all the time?

Why do I have to endure a life void of love or romance?

Why is who I happen to be seen as less valuable than others by a racist ideology? 

Why does morality protect the people who are guilty, but not the innocent?

Why do I have to relive traumatic episodes?

Why do I have to live with insomnia and chronic lack of energy?

Why do I have to cope with alienation from society?

Why do I have to live with the rejection that follows all of this?

Clearly the world is not balanced, and certainly not fair. There are some people for whom none of the above questions are ever asked. And some even more unfortunate people for whom life is worse.

There must be some kind of regulatory principle to account for this, to balance people’s stories. We cannot just leave society laissez faire and expect any kind of meritocracy to be established.  Leaving things be means perpetuating an ever worsening inequality of opportunity.

Some people start with an immense view of the world from the top of a hill, others start in a gutter filled with immense hurdles. Whether people succeed or fuck up is ultimately up to them, but how much harder is is to be something if you are emotionally crippled, living in constant poverty and fear of destitution, drained and trapped in your own body by extreme and disturbing emotion.

I do not want all of the shit that happened to me to stop me from reaching a place of thriving. I want support to flourish in spite of it. Society either needs to give more support and balance the books, or something will snap in all the people like me, and the outcome will force the issue.