Working Out the Kinks

Image courtesy of Stockvault.

The worst thing about keeping up with mental health is that it’s like trying to fix blindness while being blind and on the move. Life doesn’t want to stop and wait for me to figure out what’s wrong. It takes me an embarrassingly long time to determine things I might want to change. However, there can be occasional bits of serendipitous learning. Recently I was sick, and I couldn’t take my meds for a few days. Straightening out that roller-coaster let me see how far I’d come in therapy. I also realized some other things.

For example, I don’t know if my lack of blogging is a consequence or a cause of mental illness.
All I know is that for a while blogging every day did help with things. Or at least it was a sign things were becoming more manageable. In the past few months, I’ve been getting out of the house more, and so being online started falling by the wayside. I don’t know if this is just because I’m hitting some kind of social saturation point, or if it’s something else.

Months later, I’ve correlated lack of online output with a general malaise that’s been hovering over me. It concerns me because it’s affected my ability to connect with people. With that lack of interest comes the worry that it’s not intentional, that it’s a sign worse things are happening.

Some of it also is the nature of comments I’ve received in the recent past.
Apparently my post on how Christianity broke my mind is still getting read in some places. I keep getting comments laced with self-serving pity and remorse for my soul. Although the people making the comments might believe this is an expression of empathy and caring, it’s not. On the receiving end, it involves having to deal with yet another passive-aggressive community tactic used against people to drive them back into belief. Putting it differently, there’s no reason to tell someone their beliefs make you sad unless you’re trying to make them sad too.

As an aside, this is most likely going to be yet another rant, but the goal of this post isn’t to do that.

Rather, the point I’m trying to make is that I don’t need extra reasons to feel sad. But pretending they aren’t headed my way isn’t helping things, either. All it’s accomplished is getting me to do my usual bit of holding onto them until they become toxic. The whole point of this blog was to put them out there so I wouldn’t have to keep them.

And then there’s the whole problem of being at political DEFCON 1.
My problems with anxiety did not need help from anything, but even NPR is hopping on the alarmist bandwagon. To be sure, there have been a lot of political actions lately that do require more attention than simply shrugging and moving on. That said, it doesn’t help to see a lot of resources intentionally painting things in the worst light imaginable simply to get clicks. Since I’m trying to cut down on that, it means having to spend time actively avoiding such news.

I do feel like my last post about the refugee ban was a bit of a success. There are more emergency measures in our government which curbs awful acts than elsewhere. People are availing themselves of them, which sets other safety measures into motion. Most importantly, these safety measures do not care about pretext, political guile, or strong-arm tactics. They exist to protect one portion of the public from the other. Unfortunately, it means that I might end up devoting more of my time to political crap than I’d like.