No no, that was the joke 
. Perhaps a crass, unsympathetic joke. But I thought being in a mildly abusive relationship with a pharmacy was kinda funny, especially because I’m the supportive partner. You know, the pharmacy forgets our anniversary, shows up to birthdays drunk, and can’t seem to hold a job.
Pharmacy, you need to go to rehab! 
The disability bit (PIP) can be anything up to life, but I got it for 5 years last time. I don’t want it for life, I still have some hope of getting better, but my recovery stopped in May 2010. Labour were shit regarding benefits, but the Conservatives and Lib-Dems have made things so bad that I can go weeks without looking at the news, through fear of what they are doing.
It also looks like disability benefit fraud doesn’t exist in anywhere near the numbers the tabloid press claim it does. Why am I not surprised that the Sun had a fraud hotline?
“Be a Government Informer. Betray Your Family & Friends. Fabulous Prizes to be Won”
There are a lot of difficult-to-pin-down words in there, but:
I am certainly a straight, cisgender, able-bodied white man. As far as being neurotypical or mentally ill, about all that I can say is that I am (and have been for the vast majority of my life) functional enough that I don’t need any sort of therapy or medication. I have been treated for depression in the past, but I am currently doing well enough. I’m a nerd/geek, and so it’s not impossible that I fall somewhere in the Asperger’s area of the spectrum, but I’ve never been tested for it, and, as I’ve previously said, I’m functional enough. Social situations are not my forte, but you can’t exactly file every instance of “I find this task more challenging than the average person” as a “disorder.”
As for being progressive, I don’t know how you define the term, but I certainly think so (yay for Universal Basic Income trials in Ontario!)
I used to be much more of an insensitive asshole than I currently am (even though it still feels like that’s who I am, under a social mask), but two things happened:
Once I stopped delegating my morality to someone else, reading those stories forced me to ask myself a whole bunch of questions about right and wrong, good and evil, and how it could be possible, without looking into someone else’s mind, to judge yourself to be a better person than anyone else.
So, yes, it is possible to learn to question your own privilege, even without finding yourself discriminated against. However, in my case, it required both disassociating myself from the people who reinforced my viewpoints, and forcing myself to read things that made me very uncomfortable - things that I knew viscerally were wrong, but that I couldn’t explain to my own satisfaction why they were wrong. The problem is, I did neither of those intentionally, which is, I imagine, the only reason why they worked.
It’s impossible to change someone else’s morality, and it’s very difficult to change your own. All you can really do is encourage yourself, and others, to question every visceral reaction, and see if those reactions hold up under the magnifying glass of actual logic. It’s a very uncomfortable process, but in my limited experience, it’s the only thing that works.
Like money…
My money has always been pretty irresponsible. Not me, of course.
I don’t know whether people would call me progressive, but I don’t think much progression has been directly related to mental issues at all. In fact, it’s only in the last few months that I’ve felt mentally ill rather than just weird. Having said that, the last few months have taught me a lot of good and bad things about myself, and that alone has helped me to question assumptions. I intentionally exposed myself to different viewpoints when I was younger (not as young as would have been good though) and that also had a significant effect. Stories can help to promote empathy so you approach life with more of a veil of ignorance rather than assuming the correctness and objectivity of your position when considering other people’s perspective and actions, or how you should treat them.
ETA: I hope this doesn’t come across as othering, but having rapid cycles that can take place within the space of an hour or less and throughout the day makes me have to confront the fact that my response to external events is often heavily contingent on my mental state - even during more stable times. I wonder how much this is true with women who experience hormonal cycles or issues during pregnancy? When you can identify a causative factor in your emotions and have to acknowledge that you can’t just trust your gut feeling and you don’t always react in a logical way, it could explain the way that women are less likely to externalise mental issues (i.e. by turning depression into violence).
Short answer is yes. Suffering is part of the human condition, and compassion is built into our wetware. We all have parents. We all have an investment in each other. We’re social critters.
I’m not the person you describe. I can pass for it. I know people who are what you describe. Yes. They get it. And yes they own their privilege, and yes there’s a fuckton of progressive neurotypical straight white cis males without mental illness.
We also all have our own biases, and get adversarial, and protect our egos and identities.
Humans are WAY more alike than we are different. All of us.There’s plenty of common ground to connect with people across the lines we draw to separate ourselves.
The only problem - one of the things that makes me feel like an asshole in a social mask - is that I usually feel more empathy for characters in stories than for actual people. I understand that some degree of this is normal - life isn’t a story written in such a way to deliberately inflame the heartstrings, and you rarely (if ever) can get into the heads of other people the way that you can get into those of fictional characters - but it still makes me feel like I’m some weird alien who empathizes more with the idea of a person than with a person him/herself.
In my experience, while it may be productive to try to put yourself into a single other person’s head to understand how they are thinking, it is rarely productive to idly (as opposed to rigorously, through scientific study) try to understand how a group of people think, because it makes the assumption that all of them think the same way, or, when they behave the same way, that they do so for the same reason. Across any given two groups, there’s probably more difference between the way the two most dissimilar people within one group think than there is between two average people within in each group.
(Forgive me if that’s what you meant by “I hope this doesn’t come across as othering” - I’m not familiar with the term, and my five minutes of Wikipedia leaves me unsure if that’s what you meant)
OK, so this isn’t totally a “fuck today” but more like my productivity is fucked today, and tomorrow. Last night my partner brought home a 3 week old kitten, who had been rejected by her mother, probably because she is sick. Upper respiratory, wheezing, weepy eyes, snotty nose. The reason I didn’t go into anything related to medicine is that I am bad with fluids and grossness. The poor little thing’s face is hard for me to look at, especially the eyes, which you can’t see in this picture because she is curled up asleep.
So today, I get to feed her every two hours and take her to the vet.
I had THINGS to DO. I mean, yes, I would like to save the kitten, she should get to have a happy life, I just wish he would do the vet trip. I lost that argument, because a keyboard jockey is more flexible in scheduling than what he does. Fine. FINE.
You are doing good so hang in there and save the kitty if it can be saved. (says the guy waiting for the blood work results from the 15 year old kitty who was down to 5.5 lbs at the last vet visit, hopefully nothing horrible)
I just meant that I’m not suggesting that women are completely different, just that many men don’t have as many identifiable influences on their mood (apart from things like hunger, tiredness or stress). Even with those three influences, it’s not as socially stigmatised for men to overreact when subjected to them, and it often isn’t as drilled into you that these are your own problems that you have to deal with. It’s a generalisation, but it’s just something I was thinking about as I’ve personally become more conscious about how I react and more able to identify times when I should moderate my response. I don’t think that now my mind is being influenced by my body, but before I was free, so it helps me to be more aware of my mood at more stable times. Despite what it may seem from earlier descriptions on this thread, I haven’t been acting particularly crazy in real life, and my wife has actually said that she prefers being around me on higher doses (most of the time, at least).
It can be difficult to empathise meaningfully, but I think interacting with different people and understanding their experience can help you to understand why they would make the decisions they did or have the perspective they do. At the very least, it can help you to respect them as complex people rather than the caricatures that your group may have described.
Good luck, good vibes to you and your kitty. I hope both yours and mine have good outcomes. I know it’s a worthwhile task. I feel like a jerk for being irritated, and it’s not like I can say to a client “I can’t get that done for you today like I promised, because of a kitten”. OK, I do have one client who would tell me to take the day for the kitty, but he’s not the one I promised a project for.
She is asleep, and not behind my head / under my hair, which is where she wanted to be earlier. This backward hoodie is actually working out pretty well.
well if we are lucky it was the tooth that actually came out when the vet was scraping at the tartar and she will eat more and gain some weight. could be hyperthyroid though which will be pills every day for a long time or radioactive iodine.
Got into NYC last night to spend a day before we fly to London, then off to Bath . Yay. We’ll go to the Met, it’s glorious and we even have a puppet in case it’s busy. Last night started to feel really cold, then the fever haze drifted in and I spent last night getting up to puke/clean up the ossaoonal bad shots from fever haze. I will not be going to the Met:pensive: Can barely think, since fever hallucinations are hitting. Took 40 mins to type this.
I hope you quill feel better soon.
Fuckerdefuck, fuck, fuck, fuckerdefuck. Whole heap of hurt and unwanted thoughts emerging. Not now, need to finish other things. The hurt, it’s unexpected heavy. All the dreams and wishes.
Oh no. I’m sorry you’re struggling. Continue being brave if you can, and best of luck with discarding those negative thoughts.
Hugs of empathy!
Oh shit, now I’m crying. Pfff
Aw! I didn’t mean to make you cry! I just wanted you to know we care and you’re not alone! I hope you feel better soon!
It’s OK, it’s not bad. Thanks. Crying is not my thing and probably for the good if I manage to.
In the greater view of things it’s nothing. For me, I really need to think, somehow there is a big painful hiatus in my life.
