Meditations on the sociality of mental dis/order
social anxiety occurs in a social context
depression as a loneful hopelessness
anger can be vengeful for a wound
happiness just a capitalist invention
Mental unhealth for me feels like there is something vacuuming the fragile webs of social being that keep me afloat. The internet is like an IV dripping ever so lightly — hear the immutable chirp of the monitor delivering the results of a constant reading.
Kaiser wants me to trust the process that makes them the most money.
My therapist is probably just as fucked as I am because she keeps canceling appointments. Rescheduling makes my sweet bipolar brain exhale like a balloon when you don’t tie it after inflating — fart noise. So I don’t really do rescheduling.
Is being gentle with myself liberal?
Algorithms killed serendipity and got away with it too.
In the age of insurmountable loads of debt and data, learning mathematics just makes me feel like nothing is sacred.
What is information? Is it something separate from memory and history? Can it be beautiful too?
I try to make informed decisions. I try to practice mindfulness. But something about this set up still smells like shit.
I want to join a support group, because I don’t think it’s working out with my therapist. She is a kind and smart lady, but I need someone who’s going to be there even when I’m not there. Like anyone else you can rely on in life.
The only thing that still feels spiritual to me are my dreams, and the mantra that I’m nothing and everything. Most of my dreams are violent nightmares sketched with material spreads of sweat that pattern my entire body — are they calling that data too?
I don’t believe in the pathologization of social beings divorced from social being. But at this moment in time it has completely enveloped our way of perceiving our perceptions (is it metadata if I record it?) and it works pretty well with this computer shit.
It’s strange to be everything and nothing — and apparently there’s a word for that concept in Buddhism called suññatā.
I believe in life, like Assata Shakur. I felt those words so deeply when I saw them on the page. Deeper than any tarot spread anyone’s ever laid out for me. That material immaterial, that essence of emptiness, that suññatā.
We are sometimes violent and mostly others are violent towards us. It doesn’t erase our violence, like void/null. But you have to fight back, just enough to stop the unjust violence when it is too big. And I can still be a Buddhist. Often when I am manic or depressed I am irritable, I am paranoid, and I can be hostile to people who deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is why I got the medication. From Kaiser. Who makes money off my crazy. This is why I meditate too, though.
I am okay with nourishing the women of color who answer the phones and check me in. Black and/or Latinx ladies with nice blouses. I am not okay with capitalism.
I will stop being depressed at the same time that I accept my social beingness, which only comes with social life. I don’t drink, but we dance. Always dancing, these chemicals, these pieces of being that make me who I am, the social, the creatures, the land and sea and sky —
