Monthly Archives: October 2022

Kindness

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If you’ve read my writing for any length of time, you know I will inevitably say at some point to anyone reading my words:

Ask yourself why you think and feel the way you do and keep asking until you find all the answers that you can. Though I will warn you that you might not like the answers you find, and sooner or later you will have to deal with them.

So in an ongoing feature here, I’m going to post a question-and-answer session of mine that I’ve thought through over the last few years. Today I’m going to start off with this question:

What quality do I value most in a person?

My answer is kindness. I could have said love or generosity, but the word kindness keeps coming to my mind first. Why? Because I believe kindness is something that can be expressed in both words and actions. Genuine kindness is without judgment, and it doesn’t set a single standard, or an impossible one. I believe kindness means accepting people as they truly are and is born from compassion and empathy without any limitations.

Being kind makes you vulnerable, and that vulnerability comes from the ability to feel both good and bad. Because I believe if you can feel happiness and joy, you can also feel pain and sadness. Why is that? I think it’s because the Universe likes balance. It’s like you can’t have the light without the darkness.

Another question then is why are people unkind, cruel, and why do they embrace hate and openly scorn compassion and kindness? In truth, my answers are mere speculation, but I think they fall into one of three main areas:

1) Sociopathy: a total lack of ability to feel any emotion like kindness, compassion, or empathy. Normally confined to serial killers or abusers.

2) Narcissism: Genuinely believing they’re totally justified in doing whatever they want to in order to get whatever they want, and in turn never believing they’re wrong or accepting responsibility for their actions.

3) By choice, or as my father used to put it, people who turn themselves inside-out mean in order to survive or cope with something. Again, this is just speculation on my part, but I think people do this in order to be accepted and feel loved even if it means being mean or cruel, or openly scorning someone’s compassion and kindness.

For the longest time, I used to think I was an asshole-magnet. I used to think just because I was the person I am that assholes were drawn to me like flies to shit. Now I’m beginning to see it’s because I refused to shut off my emotions even as I tried to hide and silence them. For the longest time, I felt like my isolation and silence were wrong but now I’m beginning to see that was an act of self-preservation. It was my way of resisting turning away from my emotions, from feeling both good and bad.

Being kind and accepting of others is as natural to me as breathing. It’s not something I have to think about or think through. My kindness is genuine and true even if someone tells me otherwise. And though I live a relatively isolated life, I believe in Karma, or what goes around comes around. Many times, I’ve felt like my whole world has been kicked out from under me or will be, then I either get back up on my feet, or things turn around when I need them to. And yes, I believe that in the end, if I stay true to my emotions, to my belief in kindness in the face of raging hatred and cruelty that things will work out for the better. That’s where my faith in the good of this world comes from.

Asking myself why I think and feel the way I do has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But it’s been worth it to find answers no matter how difficult they’ve been to deal with because the clarity and knowledge is priceless. That knowledge and clarity will stay with you forever because those things can’t be taken from you no matter how hard you think someone, or this world in general is trying to take them from you.

Although I’ve taken a lot of shit for being kind, I won’t stop being kind to myself and to others. And to anyone who has felt attacked and bruised and battered for trying to do good in this world, hang in there. Don’t give up. And don’t give in.

Break the Silence

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Yesterday billionaire-idiot Elon Musk officially closed the deal for him to take ownership of Twitter. Now to most people this wouldn’t be big news and it isn’t. For those of us on social media, it is. I’m not super-active on Twitter but I do like to make pithy comments and see what people are getting their knickers in a twist over. But I also want to say the following:

People who pack up and leave someplace just because some new idiot has taken over something are the wimps of this world, and one of the reasons shit-history keeps repeating itself.

People are free to do what they want of course, just like the rest of us are free to comment on their choices. I’m sure there are people in this world who would love to tell me how they feel about the choices I make and the things I say. And they’re free to comment to me in any way they choose as I’m free to respond in any way I choose. Because as my late father used to say, freedom is a slippery concept. It’s slippery as warm shit because freedom can go either way, good or bad. That’s the problem I think a lot of people have with it. But here’s another thing I want to put out here about this:

You can’t run forever. You can’t hide from your feelings, from your pain, or from all the awful shit in this world. Sooner or later you have got to face it. And as my late father used to tell me a lot, you don’t know what you can deal with until you’re faced with it. He also used to tell me: you are so much stronger than you will ever realize, too.

My father could be as eloquent and inspiring like no one else I’ve ever known. But he could also be rude and crude with the best of them, too. I learned at the feet of a master, and if my mother were alive and heard me mouth off like I’m doing now she’d tell me I’m my father’s daughter because if my mother swore, that meant she was about to go nuclear on your ass (and I only heard my mother swear maybe half a dozen times so each time was the start of a nuclear countdown).

All my life I’ve felt like if I stepped out of line in some way, usually when I stood up to someone’s bullying bullshit, I got told if I didn’t shut up no one would want to be around me and that I’d spent my entire life all alone. But I’ve been alone all my life as I have never truly felt like I was one-hundred percent a part of anything. And guess what? I’m still here, still alive and kicking. Maybe I’m meant to be alone, but that threat means nothing to me now.

For so long I’ve struggled to put my words out in the world. And though my voice is tiny, it is mine. I know sooner or later someone is going to come at me with some bullshit. But I’m not a scared kid anymore, or an adult staying silent and eating a ton of shit just to keep the peace. I know I’ve said this before, but things have to be repeated in order for them to be truly imprinted on the human brain.

I own this domain of mine here and this site and blog are all mine. And if I get kicked off other platforms (though I honestly don’t see that happening as Elon-the-Twit and the others really don’t know what they’re doing nor do their sycophants either) I’ll have this at least. But this is a larger space for me to let it rip and hopefully any followers I have will read this. And please feel free to tell me what you think good or bad.

As my father would say, it’s time to shit or get off the pot. The clock’s ticking and I know I can’t stay silent or run and hide forever. In this world, I don’t think there is a lot of peace to be had right now. Too many people are tired, scared, and hurt, or have taken all those things and turned them inside-out mean as my daddy would say, too. I won’t turn mean for anyone or for any reason so I’ll say this:

Ask yourself why you think and feel the way you do and keep asking until you find all the answers that you can. I will warn you that you might not like the answers you find, and sooner or later you will have to deal with them.

So to wind this up I want to say to all the right-wing assholes and left-wing cut-and-run wimps I will quote the immortal words of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky:

The fight is here.

So from now until doomsday, I’m taking half an hour (give or take) out of my day to do a daily rant or ramble here. It won’t be fancy, and it will be rough as hell at times. Read it and weep or read it and get pissed off. But know this:

I will not be silenced.

Breaking Radio Silence – Lost and Found

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Last night I wrote a piece that’s still a work-in-progress about a topic I’ve never been able to write about without it becoming a raging torrent of anger, rage, and profanity. There are multiple reasons why this piece, which is about what I call ‘bad behavior’, came out the way it did and why it has given me a foundation to build on. But the main reasons it came out without the torrent of anger, rage, and gross amounts of profanity is that I have true self-confidence and self-esteem now.

When I started this journey six years ago to sort out my mental and emotional baggage, if you asked me then if I would come out the other side feeling self-confident and not thinking of myself as a worthless piece of shit, I would have told you that wasn’t possible. I would have said my self-confidence and self-esteem were lost along the way, ripped apart and destroyed many years ago and that I would never find either one again inside of me. And I would have said that back then because I used to think I was an asshole-magnet. I honestly thought that if I showed any confidence in myself, if I showed I actually cared about myself and didn’t think I was just piece of shit taking up space where I wasn’t wanted, that people would just come at me and mentally and emotionally kick the living crap out of me.

Now I know I’m not an asshole-magnet. Now I know I’m not a worthless piece of shit just taking up space where I shouldn’t. Now I know I can focus on what I want to do with my life and not give one single shit about what ‘someone’ might think about me. How do I know these things? Simple: so far no one has had the tits or the balls to come at me and tell me otherwise. But if that does happen, which I think is a matter of when and not if, I’ll be ready.

But I don’t let myself think about that last question in the above paragraph very much anymore. If that thought comes into my mind, I kick it right out as hard as I can.

Truly believing that I have self-confidence and good self-esteem has been liberating and healing. I’ve begun to feel like I’m healing from all the garbage and pain I’ve worked through. I’ve worked through the absolutely-wrong idea that my writing is nothing but me calling out bad behavior and not doing anything about it. I am doing something about it by writing because my writing is to show other people they can work though mental and emotional crap and come out the other side. Yes, I believe people can change for the better if they’re willing to do the work. And I’ve done the work, I’ve realized. Now it’s just time to put it all together in written form.

I’ve come to realize my self-confidence and my self-esteem weren’t taken from me, or destroyed but instead, I hid them away in silence. I hid them away to keep people from using them as a weapon against me. I hid them away to try and keep people from telling me I was an egocentric bitch know-it-all for showing any ability to do things or take on responsibility. Putting my self-confidence and self-esteem into silence was a coping mechanism I developed in order to keep going and fulfill my promises and responsibilities. But coping mechanisms eventually fail because they’re not meant for long-term use. And I don’t need to cope, or stay silent anymore, and I will not give in to any demand to stay silent.

Because as I’ve said before, I’m not sharing my story to get even with anyone or as an act of revenge. I’m doing it in order to help people who have been through things like I have and are trying to work through the wounds and heal them. Yes, this does involve talking about things that some people might not be comfortable with, or worse, things that might make people feel guilt and shame when they don’t want to. I’m not responsible for anyone else’s feelings, and I sure as hell am not responsible for pulling someone’s head out of their ass for them.

If you’re reading this and you feel like you have no real self-confidence or self-esteem, you do. Those two things might just be very deep inside yourself in a safe place because you didn’t want to be hurt or have them used against you. But you can take them out and put them in their proper place, and you can deal with people not liking that. You can be calm and respond by telling people to ask themselves why they think and feel the way they do. Or if they try to weaponize your emotional and mental strength against you, you can tell them to ‘fuck off’ and walk away. I used to be scared of either reaction because I’ve always been afraid of burning bridges. But if a bridge is burned simply because I believe in myself and my abilities and I’m doing nothing wrong with them, then that bridge wasn’t mean to survive.

I didn’t think healing was possible, but now I know it is. And now I’m truly ready to tell the story of how I reached that conclusion and belief in myself.