Survival Mode

In honor of season 2 of Euphoria being released on HBO Max this week, and for my cheating, dishonest, liar of a “partner” to not be able to watch it since I logged out of my own Hulu and his other girlfriend’s HBO max accounts on both of his tvs per her request upon discovering the extent of said aforementioned dishonesty and manipulation while watching his dog, his “daughter”, for him while he was on vacation in Puerto Rico–a country he might be staying in, but one that was bailed out by the guy whose apartment I stayed in one street away from the Louvre the first year I went to Paris.

Suck on my balls.

It has been a week, let me tell ya. 

I really, REALLY, REALLY cannot stress how much I absolutely did not need this character development. But, as just seems to be the case with me and “life”, probably the most unfortunate series of events have begun unraveling and I really regret making so many jokes about being the devil and going down to Georgia, because I am just emotionally getting my ass absolutely demolished and I don’t necessarily think I needed to. I feel like anyone who has read enough of the blog can maybe just take some sympathy towards that and all I have to say is that at 28 years old, I understand why so many single old ladies are so content in their old age to share the wisdom that is ignoring men. I get why my parents were so strict with me.

The world is not a nice place. 

Turns out, it hurts even worse when it’s from someone who goes above and beyond to emphasize how they choose you, or the way they plan their life with you, the way they phrase things to be inclusive (and point it out). Mu’fuckin diversity consultants. 

Someone who epitomizes and brings you back to perhaps the only formal community you remain within, the Carolina community, who evokes its presence to make you feel at home, belonged, and appreciated, just to lie to you. Someone who has heard and watched you speak on the things that have impacted you, and still impact you, who asks you to trust them, to believe in them, while being objectively dishonest, and not just to me.

It just goes to show that if the value of your words have no meaning, how do you expect anyone to allow you to lead them. When you lie to yourself, for fear of the truth, your version of “honesty” becomes subjective.

THIS is my villain origin story (as if we didn’t have enough of THOSE already).

Thank the gods for Megara, Maleficent, Cruella de Vil at times, all the strong, sassy, Disney women ahead of their time for reminding me how to channel my rage: into disgust and spite for the system that has enabled whatever these “men” are. This is what happens when we have people like Donald Trump avoid the draft, whose parents and lines of financing likely benefited from it extensively, while all the truly good ones went off and died from guerilla warfare tactics because again, we are always the terrorists on foreign land, why would other countries not view us in such a light–the civil affairs emergence in the army is just as stunted as “public health” programs in the USA. 

It is no WONDER we have such a cultural emphasis on avoiding reality. 

Which, like, what country doesn’t? 

I mean, if the Japanese government can deny the Nanjing Massacre despite the International Military Tribunal’s judgment, the USA denying the lasting impacts of racism and the necessity for public health and progressive legislation seems pretty on par, honestly. I mean, as far as international delusions go, the USA also competes heavily with Russia and China in these Olympics as well, is all I’m saying. 

Thus, the topic for today: Addiction (4:14)

Addiction is a huge problem in the United States. Dependently nourished via “escapism”, it feeds–attention, dulling or managing negative emotion, silencing or distracting intrusive thoughts, boredom, social anxiety, whatever its source, whatever its vice–alcohol, “hard” drugs, “soft” drugs, exercise, food, maladaptive physiological behaviors of variety, it all comes back to wanting to avoid, dull, desensitize, and control reality. 

It comes back to not enjoying or feeling a sense of true, whole fulfillment. It comes back to worries, anxiety, and dimming fear.

I get it.

Sometimes everything comes crashing to a halt. Sometimes you don’t have the power or energy to face it. Sometimes, even when you try, you get it wrong, you misstep, you unravel. Some days you just don’t have it.

That said, other days you might. 

Before you judge addictions, consider the repetitive habits in your own life. The foods you consume regularly, the lifestyle directives, how you spend each day, year, years. Caffeine is a chemical stimulant, not unlike many other drugs, one that we can harvest and perform differently on and regulate in a somewhat different manner, but it’s still a form of a “drug”. Everything is. It’s all chemistry.

Physical chemistry, biological chemistry, internal versus external chemical systems, everything in the world around you–the people, animals, earth itself, is made up of some different types of chemical mixtures. Whatever medical ailment you’re having at any given time is something wrong with the chemicals, the cells, of that specific organ or system.

Mental health is complicated because it’s about understanding yourself, about being aware of your internal brain chemistry and how it interacts with both external and internal stimuli. As a society, we struggle to adjust to not fitting people into one “box”, so much that a lot of people have quarter or midlife crises and don’t know who they are themselves, or how to figure that out, because even they have adapted to following the orders of that society and understanding themselves in terms of their role, their assignment, the expectations placed upon them by others, rather than their own. 

We use a lot of allusions to “battle” in modern day society that often feel a bit “misguided” to me. Referencing battling addiction of any kind, is not one of those. 

I also recently re-read “Night” by Elie Wiesel, detailing the atrocities of the Holocaust, and there were some harrowing overlaps that I think may be relevant, mentality wise, and I hope I do them justice (…and that this hopefully isn’t insulting in any way).

A few influential pieces to mention in reference to both pharmaceuticals and the Holocaust:

The medical grade amphetamines, I’m prescribed for daily use per ADHD, are similar in chemical class to the one chemical consumed most enthusiastically by the Germans, amongst all the powers in world war two who endorsed casual amphetamine use.

Nazi ideology even upholds, much like the war on drugs, that social uses of drugs are a sign of personal weakness and symbol of a country’s moral decay.

In fact, the American produced amphetamine benzedrine was used as a doping product in the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936. Mind you, the NCAA regulates prescription drug use around performance as well, and the sporting industry continues to push the boundaries for chemical enhancement. More amusing to me every day is that my mentor at Florida works within the Emerging Pathogens Institute and was a high jumper in the Olympics, representing Germany. 

Upon learning about the benzedrine use, a German scientist created methamphetamine, under the name “Pervitin” through a Berlin-based pharmaceutical company. The drug became widely popular because of aggressive advertising campaigns, of which it is worth noting that only the United States and New Zealand are countries currently allowing pharmaceutical marketing, largely in part from the problematic history.

In the USA, we have a longstanding history of many of these very same chemical manufacturers creating excessively problematic and improperly disposed of hazardous waste–waste now impacting Americans with horrendous cancers in every form, impacting the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink or bathe or swim in–disregarded by the government in favor of capitalist gain benefiting only a handful. 

Not just amphetamines, either. 

Cocaine used to be in Coca Cola. Manufactured and started right here in good ole Atlanta, Georgia. Also a company widely implicated in war time propaganda. When white people were in control of it and profiting the most, financially, it was totally legal. Widely pushed and marketed, even. And Coca Cola clearly never took a hit for that. They simply “rebranded” and escaped accountability for lasting impacts and generational consequences related to addiction.

Kinda like Johnson & Johnson realizing they have carcinogenic chemicals in sunscreens, baby powders, tons of items American consumers have used for generations, of which the lasting and chronic exposures are finally revealing themselves, just for them to transfer that liability to a shell company in order to prevent payout of reparations to the human beings being treated as test subjects, unknowingly. Only to then to ALSO have these effects further exploited in a for profit healthcare industry where Americans pay MORE and for WORSE outcomes than any developed nation, even when those outcomes are the result of administrative choices made above them, and convincing them that this is the “best” way helps prevent further accountability or access to knowledge by making it more difficult to trace clusters. 

We have a long history of (psychiatric) torment in pursuit of “science”, including use of pharmaceuticals to achieve “optimal” levels of control. This often meant treating abuse victims with more abuse, having family members who lacked the patience or education or access to healthcare able to sign off on the rights and bodily autonomy for another, and having doctors, experimenters, innovators of a form, perform chaotically aggressive treatments because they were granted the opportunity to do so. 

Looking at photos of Holocaust victims or the lasting effects of addiction can have eerie similarities. Studying the parallels of human behavior on different scales and dressed in various styles of clothing just shows that the War on Drugs was subjective racially, and undermined with eugenics connotations more than ever–especially in a modern age without universal healthcare. 

“My life, as a writer,… that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human history.”

Crimes of human history include those waged in battles of the mind, the psyche, our brains and souls. Addiction happens to be one of those battles. 

I recently chanced upon the ideology that “learned helplessness” is actually typically accurate pattern recognition. 

Silence can happen to be a form of “learned helplessness”.

When communication doesn’t exist or is not the wise choice, or you don’t know how: Silence.

It makes me consider a lot of the behavioral traits I adapted to, because of patterns of abuse in certain dynamics (and lack thereof of abuse elsewhere), and what my behavior around that person has historically entailed. Who I am to strangers, the way I approach situations because of my history of having to distrust most people other than myself, how I view myself. 

One of my “sisters”, who I love very dearly, internalized the abuse she received. Her dynamic with her family was not unlike mine in many ways, just that HER biological father was sexually abusive in addition to physically. She became silent and reserved, highly sensitive to any energy shifts or mood projections, understanding there was no necessity to communicate because it was disregarded, and therefore not worth the energy to.

I became my father, to everyone else but him. Every scene of Olivia Pope with her dad in Scandal just reminds me more and more of the tyrannical political force that runs Red, white, and blue through my goddamn veins and I work at that, every day. I am grateful, because in one way his own absolutely unchecked ego as an aerospace engineer, let alone an aerospace engineer in “post”-Cold War Era US military dominance, allowed me to also understand that even the sky is no limit. My accomplishments and achievements, the goals I was actively working towards, are what kept me from derailing into “learned helplessness”, and for that, I recognize more and more just how very fortunate I am to have had those and to believe they were achievable. Or to recognize the importance of being multifaceted, because those people, relationships, industries, or events might change, but your memories and the way they made you feel won’t, necessarily.

Those really good days, or my really good memories, the motivating factors in my life are so sweet in part because I know what the opposite side of that coin is, and I’ve had to balance out that scale.

I know how overwhelmingly present that shroud of dementor’s cloak of agony feels depressed against your form. 

It feels like dead weight. Not the heavy, warm-blooded weighted warmth of another human’s comforting embrace, but just cold, hanging emptiness, devoid of everything human yet entombed in human flesh. 

It’s a lot, but I also know how lucky I am to have that cloak, when I need it. 

It might draw attention under the looming Sunshine, casting shadows upon the flowers around my feet, or it offers comfort and a slim layer of protection from the rain, the downpour of showers that always comes when the sun gets too hot. It bathes me in familiarity intermittently, oftentimes being a burden to carry in the summer heat, but I also know it exists so I can help ease someone else’s transition into the unknown, the uncertain. 

So I can help them not feel so lost, even when they’re alone.

Because that’s what I’m good at, bridging gaps. 

The power of communication allows me to bring comfort, solace, or understanding far beyond my physical form. I write these, in part, because I understand that I won’t always be here. A lesson learned because of those who are no longer able to listen, but whose spirits live on in my memories, and who will never be able to hear the words or my stories because I was too late to help the community for them. 

…But maybe I won’t be too late for someone else and maybe I’ll help someone else know that they’re not alone in those moments. 

Statistically, you’re never alone.

There’s a weird comfort in knowing that of all the good that happens in the world, the bad is concurrently existing, and the pain you feel is shared, whether you are aware of it or not. 

When I needed him, over a year ago now, which is especially wild because I live in the same city as him and we just can’t really have communication, I guess, the Farmboy held my lifeless frame, letting the glass slippers of tears spill off the fairytale image of an idyllic human–”a never-needy, ever-lovely jewel”, while I eventually whimpered out something about life being watching everyone around you die. (As my godmother was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in her ovaries today…timing.) He just pulled me closer, sighing that he knew, and I will always love him for that, because he was able to offer me the comfort that I needed. 

The comfort of mutual understanding.

For every overdose, there are siblings who remember, parents who found them, friends who partied with them. For every suicide, whether its via hanging, or self inflicted gunshots, or cutting, or “accidentally” overdosing, there was a pattern of events that were either normalized and dismissed, overlooked in some manner, and downplayed, in part because “survivor’s guilt” is a little fucking bitch (so is “hindsight bias”) and the reality that you could have done something differently, or should have, or might have recognized the signs if you had known what to look for, really just sucks.

And it does get exhausting trying to communicate, just for nobody to listen and for the solutions to be relatively simple, yet ignored. 

I care a lot, and it is exhausting. Mind numbingly exhausting.

So I don’t judge all of the people from my hometown who didn’t have the same goals or ideas to look forward to, the same places to visit or see, the opportunity for physical escape, who sought escape out in different ways. 

I don’t judge my friends who reveal their childhood abuse to me, stacking on like 5 different people, all from religious or military backgrounds, and how they’re just now coming out of the closet, at nearly 30 years old, though I often carefully note that I suspected something was up, due to how much they drank and in what quantities.

I don’t judge the extent of trauma, or the inability to understand and have one’s choices available or clear, or the intent of the individual who recognizes they have a problem and want to work to understand that and grow healthily with a balanced life. I curate these pieces to share my writing, the framework of my mentality and education, so that other people can become sentient should they choose and want to do so. I’ve done a lot of the work myself, in a way, but I also do it so as to enable a wider connection of thought. 

So I can make the overwhelming chaos of thought make sense, at least for a while. 

So I can escape.

Everyone has a vice.

Substance Abuse Kills (18:44)

Moving from middle school to high school is supposed to be a source of excitement for people. For me, it meant trying out for the fall soccer team and being the football team’s kicker. A few weeks before orientation, for one of my best friends at the time, it meant her brother dying.

I believe it was she who found him, lying on the living room couch I’d sat on during sleepovers, unable to wake him and unsure why. She may have been the first person I knew immediately and dramatically impacted, but she was far from the last. The effect her brother’s death had on her own demeanor, her family, and her enjoyment in the community was enough to resign me to never having an interest in trying certain drugs, though. 

I’d already been to enough funerals for strings of suicides by then. Suicide by method of variation was common knowledge via life experience for me, before I ever studied public health and epidemiology, but for now we’ll keep it maintained to “accidental” overdose: substance abuse.

Elie Wiesel begins “Night” with a tale of Moishe the Beadle, a prophet of Jewish mysticism, described as:

“He spoke only of what he had seen. But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen.” 

I hope you keep that in mind as you listen. 

As Elie also states,

“those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.”

While writing this over New Year’s, a holiday I personally do not get excited about, since the 2014-2015 when it became synonymous with the date of sexual assault (so it coincides mentally with a “flashback to reality” versus a “dream of the future”), I not only found out about my current partner’s purposeful dishonesty and had them lie to my face over and over again because they were unaware of how much information I had, but also yet another death of a high schooler I had mentally filed data on since middle school, who would no longer be attending our rescheduled ten year reunion in the spring. (Or at least, I’m assuming it was an overdose, because while obituary after obituary never actually EXPLAINS it, when I can’t find any information on relevant car crashes or other police reports, in my hometown it’s a pretty safe assumption that they died of a drug overdose.)

He joined the ranks of my sister’s ex boyfriend’s twin, this kid Cadence, one of my middle school best friend’s brother, about 20+ other kids I could go through my yearbook and check off, along with my own first love. 

Of my brother’s two childhood best friends, one of them was able to access rehab, have his father permanently relocate him to put physical distance between his vices and himself, wake up for 6 days and 6 nights in feverish sweats amidst a hellish detox, and access to the resources to make and have different choices. While he still struggles often with the urges of addiction and my own family’s CONSTANT offers of alcohol despite him attempting to abide by an overall “sober” lifestyle, he’s still here. 

The other one bit his own tongue off in an overdose-related seizure, just for his own mother to find him foaming at the mouth in death, in the hometown he never left. 

It’s a particularly interesting contrast to me because at one point, I did have both of their dicks in my hand and mouth in my childhood bedroom and here we are, years later, after a series of very, very different choices and opportunities in life. 

…Nostalgia.

A third friend, who had separated from my brother’s friend group earlier than the aforementioned two, due to the location difference of middle school, was addicted to heroin before he ever finished high school. If you wanna find out where to target the next generation of high needs public health populations, just go to local pound ball football leagues or ask any middle school teacher which students are struggling. Watch the parents, the way they discuss the kid’s performances, the expectations placed upon each child–by themselves and others. While it’s important to not stereotype and always be mindful of bias and confounding variables, statistics do, ultimately, reveal patterns, and you could at least be open to exploring the potential variables with curiosity and mindfulness, as is human, so as to really comprehend the problem and to understand and (potentially) to solve it.

That friend’s middle school was in a lower socioeconomic area of town. More of a harsh mix of “rural” and “urban” poverty, so the access to more and the drive for less was always obvious, but the education around “choices” and what that meant, less so. The highlight of a lot of their lives was high school football, or even just “high school”. “Success” felt insufficient or unachievable or culminated in the years of life they had already lived, the partying atmosphere, the life milestones of dates where being old enough to drive, smoke, or drink passed and the rush to check off life experiences in the form of lackadaisical and typically uninformed drug use came and went and the bad decisions got easier and easier to rationalize and bad, illogical CHOICES are the gateway drug, not marijuana.

My own friend groups were experimenting in their own ways–Amanda discusses her meth bombs at prom, and she was one of many, MANY within a large partying circle who I’m sure to this day have no clue what they’ve actually ingested. I, honestly, saw so much disgusting behavior in relation to consuming alcohol to excess– within my familial history as war trauma treatment, the daily Jack & Coke cocktail of a farmer, and then fellow peers (and on occasion, myself) who surrendered bodily control willingly, that I mentally resigned to not have much of an interest for it myself and maybe that’s why I didn’t go to or get invited to that many parties.

I liked hanging out and talking, weirdly, normally, or no matter what. 

I didn’t need the influence of substance to be around people.

It’s All Relative: Science, Drugs, & Medicine (24:51)

Nowadays, I like to watch and hear and see drug use before I choose to do it myself–informed use and consent. I drink socially, but rarely, if ever, to excess. Loved shrooms, would definitely do it again with the right person(s). Weed is great, now that I was able to do it comfortably within my control and space, and all of these substances interact with your blood and brain chemistry in different ways.

I’m a scientist, a researcher, I like to know exactly what I’m getting myself into, or what to at least be mindful of, prepared for, and having realistic substance use programs that documentary style share the realities of drug use, the history of various substances including psychoactives, the medical considerations (don’t do cocaine if you have a latent heart condition, perhaps), and the impact of them–the way inept policy has impacted local communities in relation to various substances, the (lack of) resources or healthcare of quality and the knowledge of those resource’s existence, a holistic education on them makes that pros and cons list look a lot less EDC-everything-is-a-carnival-drugs-are-always-spiritual-and-fun-escapes more pragmatic. 

I told one of my friends who has a history of panic attacks that medication is always beneficial to have on hand–I utilize lorazepam myself when I have anxiety spikes and am lucky enough to have a doctor in a VERY well educated community, but that researching her own health condition and working to understand herself with it, especially how to separate through and logic the physiological conditions, is the key to management. 

The severe chest pains are just that–chest pains, not a heart attack. When you learn how to understand, and TRUST, the difference in your neurological alarms for “danger”, you can logic through some of them. We have the technology to track your heart rate constantly, statistically analyze the data, and reveal your biometrics back to you, available at your fingertips anytime you want it. But people are afraid of learning about and investigating their health because ignorance is bliss, just like ignorance in drug use is bliss–because you’re not the one cleaning up someone else’s vomit, moving their tongue from obstructing their airway during a seizure, waiting for a break in the delirium, hoping they don’t die and doing everything in your training to prevent them from doing so.

But what we’re doing, and what we’re trained for in the field is just that–a response. Prevention is also a choice, one much more beneficial and financially responsible to invest in, and prevention comes with legislative and regulatory directives. Narcan is one harm reduction approach. Universal healthcare, a living wage, hope and trust in society are other harm reduction approaches. Substance use and subsequent abuse is a symptom of a much larger problem–unhappiness, discontent, despair, comorbidities where physical and mental health connect that require a holistic approach.

In reference to the Fascist party seizing power, Wiesel in “Night” writes,

“Yet we were still not worried. Of course we had heard of the Fascists, but it was all in the abstract. It meant nothing more to us than a change of ministry.” 

One chapter later: “Our eyes opened. Too late.”

The next:

“What do you think? That we came here of our own free will? That we asked to come here?”

“Shut up, you moron… You should have hanged yourselves rather than come here. Didn’t you know what was in store for you here in Auschwitz? You didn’t know? In 1944?”

An eerily dystopian parallel to the effects of substance abuse and addiction.

We know that the pharmaceutical industry’s prescribing practices being related to for profit healthcare contributed and caused the overwhelming opioid crisis, with fentanyl overdoses associated now being the leading cause of death for anyone ages 18-45, yet STILL we don’t have universal healthcare. 

Why would we–when it’s both beneficial to the sporting industry and executives within our health industry to do so? 

In 2017, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health revealed 20 million American adults ages 12 or old reported struggling with a substance use disorder. 75% of those also struggled with an alcohol use disorder. 

Drug abuse and addiction cost American societies over $740 billion annually in lost workplace productivity, healthcare expenses, and crime-related costs. Literally JUST less than our military budget. 

Substance abuse isn’t just overdosing on heroin in your car in the Walmart parking lot, either, it can and commonly is mis or overusing prescription medications, the champagne problems of access to healthcare and being able to afford it. Seeing as how genetics can be attributed to 40-60% of individual risk to addiction, for a variety of reasons, both hereditary factors and how cycles of abuse are common and, just that–cycles–so generation after generation will encounter the same behaviors or, once again, history will repeat itself LESS WE LEARN FROM IT (& SHARE WHAT WE LEARN). 

One of my friends, an incredibly wealthy white girl, whose mom was once Miss North Carolina back in the day, and probably was and always has been one of the people I would’ve and always have admired for really just walking her own path, became addicted to opioids following a surgical procedure from a sporting injury. Years later, she was terrified during a different, unrelated procedure, for the recovery– because the worry of addictive potential still haunted her.

Another friend had a breast reduction a few months back and I was able to visit and function as her live-in nursing aid/caretaker, significantly helping her already substantial anxiety simply because I was there to monitor and track her opioid use, even just associated with surgical recovery.

A lot of the kids I went to high school with experienced and were encouraged to use their bodies as battering rams, especially within football, and lack the community sports or resources to be healthily active as adults, or access and know of the type of healthcare and healthy interventions (just lifting weights every day isn’t really going to be enough) and how to research them. What the right questions to ask are. So why would they have any general understanding of how their own bodies work, or should feel, when those mentalities haven’t been available to them and are definitely not being discussed colloquially around the local watering hole (bar) on a weekend night, and again, it’s taken me over 10 years of higher education and life experiences within healthcare to key in myself, so I definitely don’t expect the kids who failed 7th grade science to understand. 

Who in the community was modeling and making healthier choices accessible? Nobody. 

We have a county fair pageant for the flower of the tobacco plant.

So if they solve their chronic pain with the crushed up and snorted opioids, or injectable synthetic drugs after parties and years of crushed up and snorted opioids, or witnessing drug use after drug use where things “turned out okay”, person after person who lived, story after story of rainbows and kittens and positivity and “wild times”, “crazy stories”, instead of the crazy hangovers or hellish ER visits and they started on that path without ever actually understanding what it meant to stay on it and how hard it would be to choose to turn away and travel a very different path and whether they would be able to, they should take a deep breath and forgive themselves for their compounded mistakes and then work to understand how to communicate what they wish to say to others. 

It’s not necessarily going to be anything other than your personal version of hell, but like, look around you–humanity is pretty fucking messed up on a grand scale and we can only really work to minimize damage.

Baby steps are still steps.

It’s the scientist way of approaching most things–if you fail 1000 times, you just learn 1000 ways something doesn’t work in pursuit of the 1 way it does. 

I mean, every time I drop one of these pieces I feel like I splinter into a bomb of vulnerability and some people tell me they’re healing, so it’s all about perspective.

Speaking of perspective, Kobe Bryant was suing the opioid manufacturers and concierge doctors involved with his treatment when his helicopter crashed in case ya wanna dive down that conspiracy theory. And for every one of Kobe, for every professional athlete who takes it upon them to become involved in something larger than them, they take a continued risk to their own personal safety, comfort, and state of leisure to do so. But for every one of Kobe, there are ten times as many children who never played in college, never made it past their hometown, never were able to separate the confounding variables of poverty enough to have definitive proof for what the source of addiction is and how to respond to try and change the conditions for others because they don’t have a way out, and it’s just not plausible to think everyone should have to leave to escape. 

When I identify problematic behavior, I try to think of it in a biochemical sense. At your happiest, or most content, what motions are you doing, what ways is your body moving, what chemical synapses are engaged, for how long, and in what context? How do you tap into better living through chemistry to meet your needs in a healthier way, and why were they being actively met through whatever substances you currently use? When, if ever, were you “balanced” and by what methods? How do we as a society currently depict human behavioral habits, and in what way, and why are the choices we gravitate towards currently seeming like the best options?

What kind of marketing has trained the larger thought?

What kind of blinders?

Between 1999-2017, drug overdoses more than tripled and opioid overdoses in particular increased 6x, often the result of targeting pain management. We passed act after act recusing prescriber’s from barring responsibility or accountability in their methodology, and continue to do so despite STILL having the power for federal legislation around at least one substance (marijuana) capable of being self grown and conveniently having decades of research involving efficacy towards pain management already widely accessible and reputable. 

Not federally legalizing weed is due to decades of public policy around “the war on drugs” targeting racial minority communities and transferring the power of wealth into the permits and hands of people they “choose” who can “healthily” manage one’s businesses. Just like Britney Spears’ father could “healthily” manage her conservatorship, despite being one of her abusers, even if, at one point, it really might have been familial love and genuine concern for her wellbeing, it doesn’t excuse years of inability to adapt, remediate, and grow. 

If alcohol is federally legal and safe, the only reason not to have facilitated marijuana by now is lacking testing procedures for current active use for law enforcement or occupational purposes. It was never about pain management or emphasizing and making healthier choices accessible, it was always about control of the wealth and policing over freedom. 

Even with knowledge of our own healthcare system’s influence on the opioid pandemic, we still criminalize addiction, with the world’s most vast for-profit prison network (America #1!) and recovery treatment programs. We still devalue public health, refuse to institute living wages so areas of lower socioeconomic status and people who reside within those are more likely to have access to a much cheaper, simpler solution that effectively alleviates whatever is paining them short term than the time, energy, or money to search for alternatives. Then we increase policing as if responding to crime is the same thing as preventing it and our communities get fractured in the chaos beyond recognition. 

My mind often feels fractured similarly. 

I used to question whether it was the ADHD or the PTSD or personality, and I gotta be honest–I’m starting to think this is just “who I am”. 

That said, I’m really thriving with season 2 of The Witcher and Ciri’s character arc. 

My OG mentor loves it from the video games, though I only knew of it because of the Netflix adaptation starring Henry Cavill, cause, damn, who wouldn’t watch him…but it makes me smirk mercilessly understanding why he was so amused that I liked it, and to connect what about it I KNOW HE likes. 

There’s a lot of overlap with addiction and fear. And like most battle-heavy magical realm entertainment which satisfies my larping fantasies, it is inundated with speeches on fear and perseverance.

“Fear is an illness. If you catch it, and you leave it untreated, it can consume you.”

Learning about things has destroyed their power over me. The fear I felt in facing their situation. I felt prepared. Learning about myself has functioned similarly to calm the anxiety, the fear, the tremors hidden in the gentle rising of the hairs on my arm. Reading the bodily cues and sitting with them, observing them, exploring them, in the method a scientist would. Processing on-the-go, machine learning, sifting through stimuli, formulating possibilities and risk assessment, then executing decisions based outwardly on intuition and inwardly with the swiftness of the crew of the Black Pearl in The Pirates of the Caribbean–ragtag and schambley, but somehow incredibly efficient and well complemented.

Geralt of Rivia quotes,

“You can’t run from the world. You can’t hide from it. But you can find power and purpose. A chance to survive the horror.” 

Sometimes the world really sucks. Sometimes it’s just your own personal world. Sometimes its “the” world, as an entity. But when enough chaos and confusion and grief, pain, and hurt gets interjected into your daily life–the triggers come without any solutions. The solutions exist, and with education and thoughtfulness, you know they’re there, and yet getting anyone to listen and the general knowledge of academia and perceived limitations of a single individual makes you understand why your Grandfather went through a handle of gin a day, remaining in servitude of his country despite rampant nightmarish anger and flashbacks of undiagnosed PTSD from three different war traumas, maintaining a relatively unblemished career publicly, in search of answers. Or why he eventually preferred to spend his time reading, bored with the petty communication, caught up in establishing a legacy over begging for sympathy–mindful of how his own fellow veterans in Vietnam were discarded from the National Mall for asking for help.

Asking for help is scary. 

Especially when you need it, or want it, because the idea of having to do things alone doesn’t mean you always should, but also because the idea of finally asking for it, and it not being there, or being “enough”, or to face the recognition that they don’t value you, makes it worse. 

Especially if historically it wasn’t there for you.

Or the recognition that, by the time you ask for help, or who, they’re no longer willing or able to. 

Knowing you are alone is different from feeling like you are. (40:25)

…and unless you really, really understand that mentality, I don’t think you can comprehend how difficult it is to combat addiction. (And I use “combat” purposefully.) We are a country founded on, prideful of, our industrial military complex. That pride in the armed forces used to mean something–when it was imposing on actual terrorism, human rights violations, inept government, a threat to freedoms. We are often indoctrinated from youth to trust in a higher, male source of faith. 

When Fringilla and Yennefer are under attack, in season 2 of the Witcher, Fringilla says, “We’ll be saved. I have faith.” To which Yennefer replies,

“Forget faith. We’ve got power.” 

And we do, we have the power of choice. We have the power of democracy, of voting. Of recognizing that the decisions around you are absolutely curated by a long list of political decisions that predates you and surpasses you but do include you–whether you choose to vote on them or not.

Somewhere, when wealth and power became indistinct in late stage capitalism, and that powerful industrial military complex became a force for capitalist gain over truly defending freedom (and even in our history, the use of the American military against our own citizens has exclusively been to the benefit of the wealthiest, or the status quo, versus justice), the military prowess of being prepared to handle everything alone–because you just might have to, or you’re entering life knowing that you might be expected to, for the service in and greater good of the country, without enough resources but with at least enough to tentatively “make do”–became the backbone mentality of our societal legislation back home as well. 

They might, hopefully, prepare you for the territory. Sprawling urban jungles with earth’s most fascinatingly horrifying mammal rampant: humanity or the acres of wilderness and one of the alternative extremes: isolation. The natural world. Time to research your environment, prepare for deployment, get your affairs in order. Depending on where you’re deployed, and for what purpose you serve, you might as well be alone. Nobody in Washington, D.C. is gonna be able to react and save your ass when your life’s on the line. Which is part of my societally we emphasize personal choices to such a militant, individualist extreme. In doing so, though, we’ve made it so help is, very much so, unavailable. 

I still refuse to access healthcare, largely because of the barriers of unexpected cost that come weeks later via the mail, but also because I grew up being engrained with the military mentality of only utilizing it when everything else is completed, you have no alternative, and exhaustive research of over-the-counter, herbal, or natural remedies wasn’t useful. When you have to weigh the cost for access to basic necessities for “life”–health, and you can’t really run the risk of several hundreds of dollars in delayed and unexpected payments for something like an Urgent care visit to not be beneficial because of the financial impact on your mental health and physical wellbeing, it’s still not really “access” to care.

So how dare we act like we do enough as a society to make counseling available, even just financially. When you literally become a financial burden because you have to ask for help, when there is literally NOBODY investing in your community, or when the only role models you have exist on a television screen playing a game for a living, in it for the glory but rarely being a morally good role model within their community and a chance for something different, rarely personally connecting. But Investments come with economic control and while a universal basic income might be misused by some people for unnecessary items, sure, a lot more people might take it upon themselves to improve the communities they live in and feel safe and able to have the time to breathe and figure out how to do so. 

The average American shouldn’t be threatened with losing everything, with homelessness, with isolation and loneliness, self or community imposed, because they need help, but that’s the system we’ve currently set up. If your family isn’t already knowledgeable of or equipped to help, you’re pretty much fucked. 

Enshrouding cultures in shame just for the pretense of an omniscient presence of “love” (control) doesn’t seem to do much other than allow a convenient outlet for personal accountability, under “the devil’s touch”. Conditioning humans so your problems should only be revealed, in private, with the potential darkness of “confession”, while glorifying tales of murder, abuse, disrepair, and dark magic under the guise of far away lands and people with no personal relation to you, other than as figments of your imagination, don’t allow the realities of society to be addressed, just ignored or conveniently shuttered, and don’t provide modern context for reparations. Only silence when it matters.

In “Night”, Elie writes,

“But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.”

“And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence.”

Doctors study medicine. Teachers study education. Healers study darkness. 

And right now, a big source of darkness is our necessity to escape from communication and reality. 

When I began looking up relevant sources, some of the MAIN overdose google searches were relevant to whether or not your family would be denied life insurance–TELLING about the American society. 

Purdue Pharma was fined $635 million in 2007 for knowingly marketing opioids such as Oxycontin falsely, to be less addictive, yet doctors, patients, and the general public weren’t made aware. There were no lawmakers similarly lobbied to implement policies to prevent this from occurring again, no requirement for sponsored continuing-medical-education courses or research necessitating non addictive treatment plans or holistic health considerations. Death for thousands and millions of peoples impacted, but a mere slap on the wrist financially and minimal legislative change.

Part of this, and part of the escapism culture, struggles because Americans are used to expecting, and receiving, a quick, immediate solution for anything. Short term solutions are a necessity, (or else any democratic progress might be quickly undermined via the next election cycle as Republicans scurry to undo any of the attempted progress and use it to legitimize their own campaigns aimed at purposeful miseducation). You have some pain, you want an immediate solution–something treating the chemicals you currently experience, reducing their impact on you so you can otherwise function “normally”, but not whilst addressing their source and production. 

We scoff at yoga, holistic, healthy movement, because of its Indian heritage and holistic medical emphasis, internal reflection, healing through movement, understanding one’s physical strength through stillness and balance instead of violent or outward aggression, yet health insurance plans commonly cover pain medication but not pain-management approaches, like physical therapy, which further undermine any attempts to emphasize holistic healing. When those additional visits for alternative healing come with additional copays, unexpected billing weeks later, time to request off from work that isn’t guaranteed, the ability to prioritize yourself and one’s health or even to just understand your own needs and how to ask for them, let alone access them, and to feel like you can without causing additional stress, the prescription recommendations become the easiest, quickest, and often cheapest (for you) solution. Second, maybe, to alcohol. 

(While I do appreciate having the extra muscle relaxers leftover from my car accident on hand when my clavicular area unnecessarily holds tension, access to regular massage therapy would probably be just as beneficial and proactive in reducing incidents and cost my insurance a lot less in the long run with significantly improved patient satisfaction. Plus, if I’m trying to write for 10 hours or study the complexities of the brain, I really don’t want to be annoyingly pestered by the neurological chaos shooting through the titanium pin placement and I don’t always have the time to stretch it out in the way that it needs.)

And we can’t target issues like the opioid crisis and addiction without considering the pharmaceutical and health industries, the sporting industry, general marketing toward consumerism and pop culture. The US and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that allow direct advertising of pharmaceuticals to consumers, and right now, I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing, I just think the information has a skewed marketing perspective. 

There’s also this seeming anger at self-diagnosing for medical conditions, but especially psychiatric ones, which befuddles me, because even in medicine you should understand that the only person who really KNOWS what is going on in their body, and what is “normal” and “healthy” for them, is THAT person. Just because we are giving more people a wider variety of words and expressions to learn from, use, and explain their own behavior with, doesn’t mean that is a bad thing. Especially psychiatrically, because there’s a lot to suggest that hallucinations, visions, symbols, nightmares, dreams, are related to your memory storage and processing and if you’re slowly figuring out the words or ways to explain it, even because you found relevance in another’s perspective of their own, that’s still a great thing! Now, you don’t need to “treat” or “diagnose” everyone (yes, I remind myself of that, constantly), but if other people only experience certain patterns of behavior with you and notate it and bring it up in concern, we as humans maybe need to not react quite so harshly and consider why they would think that with their own perspective or fear. 

Something worth mentioning, doctors spend 8 years of training to still get it wrong, or cycle through multiple diagnoses as new pieces of the puzzle reveal themselves, a person learning the language or science for the first time can get it wrong, even to just themselves. To really, truly, treat to heal, is to treat to understand, and no doctor can want to understand or have the time to sift through it with you and hold your hand every step of the way. Even to them, at some point, you have to be a patient and the puzzle of their focus is often either the identified disease specifically or the general vicinity of where the pain, blockage, error in bodily communication is localized.

Those doctors can do diagnostic tests, ask rudimentary questions about factors of higher priority or implication that may be related (pregnancy, for women, no matter what), but at some point you have to be able to voice what is going on, or identify the source of pain. Yes, often you get a noncommunicative patient, physically alive, somehow, but mentally checked out, and you can coax them back to stability within reason. Reconnect the infrastructure of their body. Soothe their stressors and help to work with them to identify or provide the words beyond their current understanding.

And as a human, a patient, and individual, you do, at some point, have to be willing and able to walk that bridge alone, if only because you are the singular person with access to the knowledge and memories and events within your brain, and while others may or may not exist to offer any contrasting viewpoints or alternative interpretations, figuring out which ones to believe and trust is only going to be something you are capable of doing personally. For many of us, that is going to be really hard, because the foundations of our trust seem splintered and ruined–preserved in disrepair, like the Roman Coliseum, a testament to the historic battles, recalling periods of glory, now serving as public display for education and reconsideration of barbery.

For that, I understand the benefit of what religion offers most. A theme to place your trust in, community, abstract values, intangible, always reachable even at your weakest and loneliest moments.

“But what can someone like myself do? I’m neither a sage nor a just man. I am not a saint. I’m a simple creature of flesh and bone. I suffer hell in my soul and in my flesh.” 

It amuses me to no end that church is where I first learned the power of dissociation and where I came to value my own voice of reason and judgment.

Losing my religion is exactly where I found my faith.

My power.

Elle Woods was right, above all, you must always have faith in yourself.

Goes to show the impact of poor leadership that is inherently flawed, or how an inability to apologize and account ripples chaos throughout your life unexpectedly and unpredictably. (Whether you intended it to, or not.)

Have Evangelicals considered that the “war on Christianity” might be because certain aspects of the institution of things like the Catholic church are faulty, or dammed? 

Elie Wiesel reflects,

“Blessed by God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled… because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death.” 

“You chased [Adam and Eve] from paradise. When You were displeased by Noah’s generation, You brought down the Flood. When Sodom lost Your favor, You caused the heavens to rain down fire and damnation. But look at these men whom You have Betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before you! They praise Your name!”

Some countries remain entrapped in physically grotesque displays of violence, for others, modern warfare is more sinister. Underhanded displays of politicians “playing god”, or creating widespread distrust of our own national, unbiased institutions, of diverse intellectualism, ripples in the faith. Sneakier, more subjective threats to national security, intelligence deviously injected for psychological torment. 

A craft I researched, perfected, and now move to extinguish. 

So I will have faith in the endless ruck march to reinstall actual freedom, or power for the people, and all of the people, who reside within our communities. I will tredge on through the guerilla warfare cruelty of going into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for people who don’t want your help and have leaders calling to ignore their help, who expect you to politely await for your cue to respond to preventable disasters that trainings and protocol already exist for, yet were conveniently ignored in an attempt to assert that intellectualism has no power here. 

I will try to remind myself of Daenerys Targaryen’s misfortune in overextending her power–skewering the bodies of those who attacked her, demonizing noncompliance as “enemy”, being harsh with anger and vengeance and too reactive for patience. In having to assert, repeatedly, her expectations (“demands”), she became unwilling to compromise and unable to separate herself from the larger picture–peace, a change in the realm, justice. 

A fiery, intimidating dragon, her mere presence put people on the defensive, and she spent so much time at war that it became difficult to sift through, trust, and recognize the different intentions of those around her. Would she have been willing to believe them? With her life’s work, her happiness, her life on the line, would she have been able to take those risks? 

But, it’s not so much that I feel strong,
it’s that I am more afraid of the future in which we do nothing. 

War on the Homefront (58:40)

I reference Elie Wiesel’s “Night” so frequently, because I imagine the sentiments of the horrors of the Holocaust being shared with that hollow recollection in my grandfather’s eyes. The hollowness of the transient populations, empty, tired, and stranded in life, often plagued with too much instability, too much exploitation of their energy and too little community, too few and rare the reward, that in the worst of cases, and mentally, you may not have the words to express the battle in your mind, but books and research on the horrors of the world may. 

And the choice to start over isn’t as simple as all the old war veterans who packed up their belongings and left their incidental families when they were relocated to a different town, starting over with a new wife, new kids, new hope–only to be discovered years later at the whim of curiosity and modern technology. I personally love this generation’s use of 23andme DNA tests to really shell shock the old “your father went out for milk one day and never came home” racist implications to show just how many family secrets exist in white families, too. 

However well intended your methodologies were, however well anticipated the expectations were aligned, it doesn’t detract from the impact of actions you may never even be aware of, for years. (Let’s not forget my friend whose dad fucked a stripper, only for his “illegitimate” child to stalk their family at 12 years old, much to their dismay.)

…and I think a lot of the addiction I’ve witnessed and observed stemmed from fear of acknowledging the difference in one’s perception, or the truth in other’s words, or that they think truth in description in those moments universally means it encompasses the entity of their character, versus the repeated behavioral impact on that person and what evidence they have to contribute to that perception. 

“I was afraid of finding myself alone that evening. How good would it be to die right here!”

I am afraid every day that the family member who stole my mom’s pain medications for an UPCOMING surgery while visiting for Thanksgiving a few years back, who we caught on our camera system doing so, will overdose and die and will die bitterly angry at me because their own ego prevents them from getting help or at least communicating with ME why I shouldn’t be worried.

I am fearful that the family member with a history of taking my own medication without asking–vicodin from past surgeries, adderall from daily adhd, etc, who couldn’t grasp that it wasn’t that they wanted it, it was their dishonesty and assumption that it was fine to do so, utilizing my items for their own gain, without allowing me consideration to make a choice because they were too afraid of the response that they crafted a dishonest form. I suppose, to them, it didn’t feel like a choice that would REALLY impact me, so it wasn’t necessary to ask. 

I have incredibly high standards for honesty and communication these days, and because I’m so aware of the day existing where I don’t get to communicate, and where I can no longer, I will always stress the importance of it, even when I know I’m not the best at it. I have had my consent removed or chosen without my approval too many times to not. 

At the same time I am afraid, I am also thankful and hopeful because of the friend in my brother’s social circle who reached out to me after going to rehab a few years back, who thanked me for the posts I shared on social media about addiction and told me it made it easier for him to know an alternative was there. It doesn’t make it easier for me to feel like the bad guy, the scapegoat, exhausted because I’m still healing and impacted from their decisions made on to me years ago that still impact and effect my reactions and behaviors now, my ability to trust especially, but I at least feel strength to not feel responsible for their choices.

I am proud of the multiple men who like to align themselves with “alpha male” strength, especially being from Florida, who have called me and came out as bisexual, with me being one of the first people they’ve told, and one who called me to talk about wanting help with their addictions that masked those fears.

Men who became more afraid about living as someone they’re not than fear of societal and their community’s judgment.

Men who became more afraid about withholding their expression and ability to love than communicating it. 

I feel pride in these cases, and joy in “just” verdicts as they come across the news, but it elicits only temporary happiness without organization on a federal level that impacts the ability to ignore progressive norms undeniably relevant to all communities, with addiction treated and viewed differently based on outward appearance for how much money you’re worth more so than what type of drugs and factors led to your addiction. 

And those verdicts don’t bring back the dead.

I know that legislation alone won’t change those factors, either. It takes education, time, and cultural shift, but the legislation drives the framework for it, and if we can invest $770 billion in our nation’s military, going tens of billions of dollars over the asking budget in a time when we’re supposedly “not” “at war”, then we should be able to invest just as much within our own borders and, minimally, enough to make the actual necessities of local communities afford a comfortable living wage without constantly being worried that federal disruption will make those communities unsafe or one medical procedure will render them bankrupt. People are not willing to work jobs for poverty wages and over prioritizing administration, executives, or any other level that isn’t necessarily doing a “harder” job, they are just managing different things, has made our societies unhealthy at their core and small change simply isn’t “enough” because there are humans who are being killed every single day who have been indoctrinated by right-wing frameworks to have Stockholm syndrome for their oppressors. There are humans who live under these rules and regulations in fear of themselves because wanting better, differently, and knowing that can’t simply be the norm ostracizes you and makes you an outsider.

There are people who shame themselves for biochemical reactions felt and learned, whether it’s under the intensity of substance distortion or curiosity, and there are people who end up killing themselves, “accidentally” overdosing as if wanting and needing to escape real life, however “temporarily” isn’t worrisome.

When I hadn’t let that MLS player’s older brother stay over, because I have to protect my environment right now and I don’t handle threats to my physical safety in that very cautiously, and unexpected stimuli is still a threat, until it can be deemed “safe” (again, I’m starting to think it’s just the way I was raised), he revealed a fear around his brother’s drug use. It doesn’t change the lack of consideration for my own boundaries, or the lack of adequate discussion around expectations and honesty in those on his end, but at least I could understand that he drank so much in a cycle with his brother and I recognized that his brother probably drank so much because he didn’t necessarily know where he “fit in” to his brother’s social circle in Atlanta–it’s a lot different and people treat him a lot differently than he would have ever known before, and drugs of variety might seem new and fun and exciting, for a while, but they get less exciting as the names start piling up of people you know. I know he was fearful of the vulnerability too–and in truth, I still feel he deserved the worded retaliation he received for every hour of silence and excommunication. 

Communication and recognition can be scariest of all. I know those administrators, executives, and figureheads weren’t writing the prescriptions themselves, weren’t personally peddling the opioids, but because of year after year after year of inept leaders, we reduced public accountability and place more blame on the person who was unable to feel love, reception, and joy in community than in those who created a community to remain that way for profit.

People in medicine, or careers like dentists, pharmacists, are often at the highest risk for “abusing” prescription drug related practices. While they have increased access to the sources, as well as holistic knowledge of the extremes and “norms” for use–medically and recreationally, a lot of higher education also involves understanding the intended uses and, coupled with commonality in access, can lead to integration of said uses at personal discretion versus the medically referenced directive. Not uncommon, either, especially since a lot of pharmaceutical use emerged because they were used unintentionally or accidentally or incidentally and neat little side effects emerged, like antibiotics being used to treat acne. 

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), “is charged with evaluating the safety and effectiveness of drugs when used as directed” and “evaluates drugs one at a time, rather than as families of semi-interchangeable molecules such as opioids. This has made it difficult to respond to the ever-increasing diversity of synthetic opioids” and inherently built in a system incapable of considering implications for misuse. We have pharmaceutical lobbyists who pay for legislation that benefits their company, or drug, and pay for policies that prevent external regulation, all the while facilitating internal research that can be kept hidden–as is the case with many issues American consumers face, whether it’s in reference to nutrition, the NCAA and NFL, or healthcare.

We know that benzodiazepines are emerging as the next class of drugs to have similar outcomes. Given that antipsychotic medications are prescribed at higher and higher rates to lower socioeconomic areas, without considering or offering holistic intervention because of lack of government administration facilitating healthier communities to be prioritized, not solely in relation to direct medical treatment, we can anticipate a similar climatic rise to parallel that of opioids. 

Praise Ye (1:09:07)

Kanye West really is our 21st century schizoid man and the conflation of his narcissism, known history of mental health and discussion around the way medication affects his creativity, makes his divorce to legal mogul Kim Kardashian that much more fascinating. Kim chose to work smarter AND harder.

Ye chose Christian religiosity and released an album to target and influence black religious affiliation of Christianity, while entering a political campaign late and endorsed by right-wing, religiously affiliated backers? I mean, fair, he warned us about how he felt being called “the abomination of Obama’s nation”–it WAS a pretty bad way to start the conversation, but it DOES seem a bit ironic that this man’s career was founded on the back of how “the system broken, and the school’s closed, the prisons open” or how “we ain’t got nothin’ to lose, ma’fucka, we rollin’” but he wouldn’t endorse more progressive public health legislation. SO close. He even told us in Monster, “Love, I don’t get enough of it.” Can’t believe the trajectory of a man who started so strong with “if I don’t get ran out by Catholics, here come some conservative Baptists, claiming I’m overreacting” eventually caused so much chaos in his own communities that he joined the ones who weren’t taxed because his version of love WAS money. Just like the pharmaceutical and entire healthcare industry. 

(Which, Ye was right, prescription rates are SIGNIFICANTLY higher in low socioeconomic areas and, as such, a lot of racial minority communities, but he also isn’t endorsing tangible policies to address them so he can shut the hell up. What a false prophet. I have also been “a menace for the longest”, only I at least understand the importance of having government administration facilitate economic freedom and a socialist baseline to any healthy society. Almost like an economic system that functions under the trickle down economics of an MLM, ponzi scheme, or pyramid scheme isn’t the best in rebuilding themselves when they’re denied access to the resources to do so and our decrepit tax system pilfers from the poor and gives to the excessively wealthy with no incentive to benefit society.

The wind is whipping up, the waves are gathering, so when the storm hits, or the next one after that, it simply isn’t logical to say that nothing could be done. Just like it isn’t logical for parents of suicidal children to feel like there were no warning signs. You either weren’t looking for them (which is fine because not everyone is trained to and it does suck to be trained universally for disaster, expect it constantly, and not trust the calm) or admitting the signs were there and were communicated and you didn’t read them right or react beneficially or understand what they needed or the way they were hurting and feeling and you didn’t have the time to communicate and figure that out because you were scared to–a fear that became relevant and realized because now you don’t have the choice to not–is too hard and you can’t grapple with that and forgive yourself. But you need to. 

We, as communities, need to be willing and able to communicate about what was wrong, in addition to what was positive.

It’s not “focusing on the negative”,
it’s improving our weaknesses and not relying on constant strength.

Those reiterations of trauma are not meant to cause more pain, though they inevitably do.

Understanding and overcoming addictions means overcoming trauma. 

Wiesel’s faceless neighbor in chapter 5 hauntingly stated,

“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.”

For a lot of Americans, they lack the faith in government to improve conditions, to reduce and prevent further corruption, and addiction overwhelms when in addition to lacking faith in government, in community, they also lack faith in themselves. 

“Death enveloped me, it suffocated me. It stuck to me like glue. I felt I could touch it. The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist… To no longer feel anything, neither fatigue nor cold, nothing.”

“But all I had to do was close my eyes to see a whole world pass before me, to dream of another life.”

The subject matter may be different, but the sentiment and expression may often be the same.

I think I understand more and more that my very presence and being can be particularly triggering to people, my own family at times, because it reminds them of the realization of how bad they felt. When they can read the pain on my face, when they can see the torment in my eyes, the physical exhaustion of my body, the mental clarity and at times, disgust, for the way their actions impacted me and how those are cast aside, disregarded, clouted by ego instead of recognizing, considering, and redirecting in those moments. They double down and defend, refuse to apologize, or isolate me because admitting their actions were inherently dishonest, or that their personal choices don’t simply impact them, seems to be one of the most difficult things in the world.

I become immortalized as the “devil”, this bad omen, because I am a reminder of that moment of recognition, or when the communication clicked in a way for them to understand, and I don’t come shrouded in illumination and unconditional love like the angels in the storybooks, here to wave off all of the nightmares with the angelic feathers of my wings, dismissing the negative with my sheer presence. I come with the ethics and morality side of accountability, of solutions instead of bandaids, of balance and restoration of peace, of communicating and deploying boundaries, of the discomfort of growth, the uncertainty of the unknown, which, for many, is healthy communication and understanding. 

I come with the knowledge of what happens to those who face combat after combat. The weariness of checking over your shoulder constantly. Being manipulative and dishonest to me and then thinking anything other than a direct, clear, perhaps a somewhat timid approach, is helpful.

I also remind myself that everyone learns in their own way, in their own methods, and at their own time. The diversity of education, or just “diversity” in general, is something we should be prioritizing because it emphasizes mutual understanding and the different methods in which people learn about life. Many have to learn observationally, through experience. People like that are especially important for addressing systems that have inherent flaws, such as those that test items purely for their intended use without consideration for misuse or equally strong legislation around adapting to research that reveals its misuse, because the system that was designed didn’t work for them, but could. I preferred, and always benefited from, a diverse mixture of learning through books, reading works spoken directly and those immersed in the arts, veiling abstract concept under less formal musings, and activity, learning observationally, connecting my body and mind with my teammates, the animals and environments around me, reading cues or notating behavioral signs or interpreting energy while executing orders.

I jump from tree limb to tree limb of subject matter with the dexterity only of someone with innate experience and immersion in the environment of education, because I was planted amongst it. 

Your life’s experiences, which for me, just so happened to coalesce my social and work life within my academic environments, where I felt safest within, are the result of choices made before you, individually, consciously, subconsciously, genetically, communally, administratively, politically. The choices and decisions influenced by the people around you–purposefully or not. I found power, and strength, in learning how those systems were built and for what purpose and how they have or have not evolved to adapt with modern technology, modern scientific advancements, modern social structure. 

I found comfort in all of the statistics that I did fit within, and all those I did not.

Whether currently, intermittently, or permanently. I felt solace in understanding that I was not alone, that there was a larger reason or influence of impact beyond my comprehension for all of the events that have impacted me, that I deal with, that I learn and grow from, and that there wasn’t anything to do with faith, it was a difference in the education and framing of choices.

We have an entire internet system to educate that was designed with taxpayer money, for the basis of national security, not currently available to all, yet one that is capable of reaching and educating areas where formal, in person education is less available or not possible, because these people’s lives don’t get the luxury of stopping for 2-4+ years when the rest of their family or community is counting on them, and these “necessary” community positions, such as working in healthcare or teaching, are somehow less profitable than something like alcohol or cigarette sales, so many never get to.

One of my pals seemed absolutely insane at the time when she dropped out of college my sophomore year to build internet cables in Costa Rica or some area of South America–she is like, the PRIME, PRIME human trafficking victim, but at the same time, her weird intuition and ability to sense energy MAY actually keep her safe, who knows. I should track her down someday soon. Either way, she seemed absolutely nuts at the time and kept pressing on the necessity for action and I don’t think that’s what her highly religious, white North Carolinian family expected when the church encouraged missionary style work.

We have made it so that downtime isn’t fun or alluring or easy to enjoy, either, because the general public is just so damn overworked and those resources or solutions or commonality of education isn’t available. 

Sometimes it would be nice if my mind would shut the fuck up (1:19:58)

Shows like Euphoria, which highlights the reality of addiction directly, and The Vampire Diaries, framing substance abuse under the guise of “supernatural” influence and offering a somewhat easier viewpoint because of the magical realm and considerations, are not shows that I watch with my family. 

Some of my friends only consume reality TV or media, sporting games, anything that is and remains a distraction from worrying about real life. I understand it, and I’m willing to participate in it for the shows that people actually want to discuss with me (and let me know), but it’s not what I gravitate towards. 

Maybe it’s the biochemist in me, in fact, I’m sure it is,
but everything I do, I see chemicals now.

The products I use, the food I consume, the air I breathe, water I drink, bathe in, swim through, everything is just chemicals. Whether it’s alcohol, prescription medication, drugs from the street–CHEMICALS. Using chemicals to escape means making a choice to avoid the other ones available to you–but that rush, that high, that source of alleviation from pain is always going to be temporary until you’re willing to confront and consider why you’re seeking those avenues to get it over what other options exist. What people’s energy you’re relying on, who and what you’re using and in what ways to get the love you so desperately seek, and need, as humans. Why you’re afraid to communicate, how to word it, ask for it, explain it,

and why you’ve grown to assume that silence is more comfortable than discussion.

With relation to a lot of things my family struggles with, one of the largest ones is communication. When my granny died, the matriarch of our farm, the organist for all the churches, the cheerleader and emotional support for all of my grandaddy’s physical achievements, part of my family’s ability to communicate died. It was, quite literally, “the day the music died” and “with every paper I’d deliver / bad news on the doorstep.” A piece was missing, a chunk of warmth that once radiated light and love with every stroke of the key and every gathering to play bridge. The music that floated through family gatherings came less often, as family who didn’t want to assume they would be invited worked to make other plans so by the time mine finally got around to communicating, they might have been welcome but probably felt like an afterthought. 

My family is fractured and global. Military through and through. We all serve a higher purpose in different ways, and are cut from tough cloth, different cloth, military rations. Rarely are we physically on the same continent at once, let alone the same coast, and definitely not in the same state. There used to not be a need or ability to communicate when apart, and some members seem to struggle to adapt and recognize that boundaries in communication are ways that humans feel safe learning from each other. 

I haven’t ever had much safety in expression around my family. I struggle, still, to adequately identify and communicate with mine, because years of being screamed at and mocked for crying, or accused of emotional manipulation just because my outward physical expression affects you and makes you recognize that you maybe should feel a bit differently, has shown me that the outcome wouldn’t matter. It would only cause pain, adding on to my parent’s stress. And my family was pretty damn privileged. Pretty fucking well educated and fortunate in a LOT of ways, though, again, that doesn’t mean I have to universally flaunt their praises. 

I grew up witnessing and hearing story after story of war trauma abroad, and the supposed safety back home. 

I didn’t always have that safety at home, though.

I had control, and to that I obeyed (mostly). Bessel Van der Kolk, MD, states in “The Body Keeps the Score”, that “after trauma, the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don’t.” His patient’s, veteran’s, “in the group, they found resonance and meaning in what had previously been only sensations of terror and emptiness. They felt a renewed sense of the comradeship that had been so vital to their war experience.” 

“We now know that more than half the people who seek psychiatric care have been assaulted, abandoned, neglected or even raped as children, or have witnessed violence in their families.”

And yet, we often frame these things as children or people or humans with disorders, with inherent problems with who “they” are, instead of a series of predictable, preventable choices of things that were taken out on them. Choices of action, choices of reaction, choices of passivity. We make accusation after accusation of something being wrong with people, instead of asking them why they are hurting.

We treat them as problems to solve instead of as human beings, and our government choices facilitate that barbery. 

“Scientists at the National Institutes of Health begun developing techniques for isolating and measuring hormones and neurotransmitters in blood and brain, [since the 1960’s].” 

“Anger, lust, pride, greed, avarice, and sloth–as well as all the other problems we humans have always struggled to manage–were recast as “disorders” that could be fixed by the administration of appropriate chemicals.”

Which is true, to a degree, because inability to control one’s emotions and seeking help around that in whatever way is a good social consideration to study in relation to the mind. Especially given that different emotions or activities evoke varying electrical patterns within the brain, studying and isolating these emotions, and determining the subsequent chemical processes involved, facilitates a core understanding of why humans work in the way that they do. On micro and macro scales. 

However, in doing so and not having universal healthcare or regulation around pricing, they managed to vilify and reduce emotive expression for fear of psychiatric imprisonment. They managed to contain human expression and cohesion to a narrow frame of reference.

They manage to police mental health breakdowns with armed insurgents whose version of reducing the threat has commonly evolved to solely consist of eliminating it, and often who are responding to situations under the assumption that the “threat” is a human being separate from them. Different. Lesser. A breaker of the very thing they are tasked to uphold.

At times, and based on the perception of one’s “humanity”, they are even trafficked around rehabilitation centers, kept under isolation and observation for profit. People with addictions are shuttled in and out of prison facilities, oftentimes the only reliable source of shelter, food, water, and a bathroom. In and out of ambulances, emergency rooms, hospitals. Desperate to learn and have control over themselves, but often only given it with an attached expectation, the ability to observe, control via management, financial interest. Conditional love. 

And we wonder why they rebel against the confines of their “freedom”. 

Why they aren’t safe to trust that it won’t be ripped away from them at any given moment. 

Why our fears around death, specifically the profit in death, culturally have enabled and shaped eugenics movements and mentalities which exist in our societal framework because, I mean, we did kinda welcome 88 Nazi scientists to work WITH our government and TEACH us their ways so it’s really not that far of a stretch, especially after the looney bin that was the January 6th insurrection which shoulda showed you just high up the conspiracy goes. (All the way to the top.)

And all I’m saying, is that maybe, MAYBE, a government that continues to be filled with people who tried to overthrow an entire democracy should maybe have some leadership come out and just lay it straight, like a “oh yeah, so we fucked up BIG TIME. Like, super super badly. Capitalism has been a disaster we are impeding our own nation’s progress with greed, all of these international wars in which we utilize overseas intelligence officials of variety, expats, integration into government throughout years of devotion to projects and plans are also kinda happening on our own land, even within those very same communities of immigrants and refugees whose homes aren’t safe, probably because we made them that way! Or sold weaponry to the people who do! and who left in search of the unknown, freedom, a better life, which is conveniently EXACTLY what Christopher Columbus supposedly did and all white Europeans in the USA because that’s what human migration is, and maybe, just maybe, we can not be dicks about it, especially after we spend all our goddamn time bragging about how fucking great this country is. What the fuck did you think was going to happen– 

(ugh, I feel like you can tell my dad’s side of the family is from New York when I get ranting like that. Also, German immigrants fleeing Europe to escape the Holocaust, relocated to New York, and have since migrated South permanently?

The only real difference in “immigration”, “moving/relocation”, and a “transient” lifestyle is the types of contracts involved, feasibility of border crossings and enforcement of such. 

Enough white people have adopted the vagabond live-in-a-van lifestyle due to the absurdity of rent prices and should keep in mind that they’re always one disaster away from being homeless, (even if just for repairs).

Enough white people also grow, consume, and sell weed for exorbitant financial profit. 

I’ve also seen WAY more white, wealthy, or well-educated people do cocaine, shrooms, crushing up and snorting adderall, or any other variety of substance use and definitely overwhelming abuse, so maybe we could just like acknowledge the reality we’ve created, even abysmally, in the subjectivity of trauma and judgment on addiction based on whether they meet certain incredibly subjective, arbitrary versions of “success” without asking them what their version of “success” means. 

Maybe we could not be so afraid to just ask the questions,
and to explain our fears. 

Maybe we could not be so exhausted by misguided assumptions of help instead of helping people ask for and learn what they need, instilling in them the idea that it will always be available, that they are safe to, protected and welcomed, versus feeling shut out, left to trek home, forgotten, lost, and alone. 

All’s Fair In Love & War (1:30:08)

A war “hero” is one whose individual struggle and perseverance for life, their goal to return to a home and a system that may never have had the ability or planned to search for them, their trust and faith in a structure or institution or nation and ability to rely on it, to come back to it, to execute orders and return, as service commands, is unmatched. Not every war we fight is overseas. Not every monster flays their dead, slaughtering them in horrific crimes and destroying the evidence via radiation.

Unit 731 was, after all, part of the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department, doing covert biological and chemical warfare research and development. And what else did we do, in the interests of human curiosity and science, but we granted researchers immunity in exchange for the data they gathered during human experimentation. Test subjects, over 400,000 human beings–political prisoners, common criminals, the homeless, mentally handicapped, infants, elderly, pregnant women, were tortured, injected with diseases, even ones disguised as vaccinations (and yet we wonder why Trump and the anti vax campaign was so detrimental to coronavirus). Limbs were amputated to study blood loss. Bodies were surgically opened, organs were removed or reattached elsewhere, boundaries were pushed in the name of science, curiosity, and government profit, to the detriment of nonexistent human rights. Biological warfare of bubonic plagues, infected in populations of fleas bred in laboratories, paratyphoid fever, cholera, smallpox, botulism, disease after disease to weaken the national security of the country, dropped in attacks on entire cities or individual tests on prisoners of war, no limit to the madness, simply creating so much chaos under the pretense of war, medical advancement, science, racism and nationalist division, that the patterns of human behavior began to highlight simply what you wanted to do, not why you wanted to do it and whether you should, or what it means to understand your choices. Whose orders you’re actually following, what misperceptions of “freedom” do you have? What are you most afraid of? Motivated by? Missing? What choices are you still holding yourself for, or hoping that people forget, or fear that people remember and judge you for versus asking because they are trying to learn to understand.

What have you learned not to, or are scared to say?

“The road was endless. To allow oneself to be carried by the mob, to be swept away by blind fate. When the SS were tired, they were replaced. But no one replaced us.”

“We were the masters of nature, the masters of the world. We had transcended everything–death, fatigue, our natural needs. We were stronger than cold and hunger, stronger than the guns and the desire to die, doomed and rootless. Nothing but numbers. We were the only men on earth.”

“Beneath our feet there lay men, crushed, trampled, underfoot, dying. Nobody paid attention to them.”

“Not a sound of distress, not a plaintive cry, nothing but mass agony and silence. Nobody asked anyone for help. One died because one had to. No point in making trouble.”

“God knows what I would have given to be able to sleep a few moments. But deep inside, I knew that to sleep meant to die. And something in me rebelled against that death. Death, which was settling in all around me, silently, gently.”

“But death hardly needed their help. The cold was conscientiously doing its work. At every step, somebody fell down and ceased to suffer.”

“Wasn’t it dangerous to lower one’s guard,
even for a moment, when death could strike at any time?”

“Our minds numb with indifference. Here or elsewhere. What did it matter? Die today, or tomorrow, or later? The night was growing longer, never ending.”

“In the early dawn light, I tried to distinguish between the living and those who were no more.
But there was barely a difference.”

These human beings, these siblings, the childhood friends, colleagues, family, people, who get addicted for one reason or another and haven’t been taught to be aware of or have choices because of the administrative policy that has removed them from being possible, removed education around critical thinking, and vilifies and disregards people who need our help for normal, human curiosity around opportunity, who have been conditioned to think and act impulsively and blindly follow the faith of others, these people shouldn’t need to escape the reality we’ve created so badly and if they understood what those realities actually mean, if they understood what the people who have found their bodies or administered narcan or feared every day that the next morning they would wake up to not have that opportunity to share it, if they understood that they were LOVED, still, regardless, maybe that chemical high wouldn’t seem so alluring. If they knew they wouldn’t get punished for trying to communicate or seen as a burden for not having the answers or the right people in their immediate social circles, circles that likely contributed to their decisions to partake in certain behaviors, whether purposefully or not, if they could trust that they were being treated with honesty and clarity, instead of isolation, or weren’t always the one who had to bridge that gap of isolation when it was caused by chasms of pain. 

When people don’t know how to stop the pain they’re causing, or don’t and can’t understand the pain, because all they know is that they’re hurting too, and they’re struggling so hard just to survive, the easy out is, logically, death.

It’s often impulsive, though questionably not without excavating previously unearthed emotional evidence that then gets passed around archeological circles for novelty, often unnoticed until the right mind connects the missing segments.

When Elie sees his father in the infirmary, “he had become childlike: weak, frightened, vulnerable. I know that I was no longer arguing with him but with Death itself, with Death that he had already chosen.”

At some point, it is true, that at the end of the day you can only, ultimately, be responsible for yourself. 

The purpose of healthily, functioning communities, though, and specifically the government that oversees them, is to create networks of people with specific, individually curated skills, who apply them to areas where they are needed, in whatever that special way is, so you don’t have to feel physically and mentally alone, isolated, even if you may be, so you can figure out a way to safely explore, to live at peace, without the impending threat of financial burden and uncertainty. Assuming that humans lack the resources to work together and figure these out as a community, and don’t have to be shipped off to potentially die overseas at the hands of capitalist gain, but instead could and should be able to remain in their local communities, their circles, to potentially die within our own own borders at the hands of capitalist gain and the propaganda directing marketing of education around sensitive topics.

Then when the people around them are more afraid of their words, of communicating, of thinking that doing so or asking how they can be of help or stating that they need them here feels selfish, we remove and isolate love further. 

I’m definitely not always good at that. 

“I shall never forget the gratitude that shone in his eyes when he swallowed this beverage. The gratitude of a wounded animal.”

What are humans in society, but wounded mammals? What is addiction, stress, a constant exhaustion for survival where the goalposts are always moving out of range, facets of human behavior impacting social cohesion that we currently allow and encourage, even administratively, from the learned helplessness of silence.  

Love is communication.  (1:38:39)

Sometimes that is words, and sometimes you have to consider why you’re particularly triggered or impacted by someone’s words, sorting through their intention and consideration instead of your assuming perception and fear of the judgment. (This is also a reminder that objectively “negative” judgment isn’t necessarily a bad thing–removing the stigma around these discussions and the way we view them as a society and with our policing network is that much more important, because a “judgment” is just a sensible conclusion. 

I may write harshly at times, but I’d still rather listen to you try to find the words, even if they can just be summed up in an “I’m sorry”, then see you hurdle yourself to your death for any reason. 

“Sometimes our deepest hate is for the things we cannot change about ourselves.”
(Vesemir, The Witcher Season 2)

I know I’ve been triggering to people in the past, in the current, and will be in the future because who I am reminded them of who they were not, and they excluded me as a result. They bullied me, extensively, as a result. Or they removed themselves from me like I’m a leech because I am different, I do communicate oddly, strangely, and in peculiar ways. I’m (typically) not afraid of confrontation, though I certainly struggle with abandonment because, honestly, why would I not? My entire family’s military lineage set up the men to one day serve their country, ship off under someone else’s orders, and possibly die or never come home and be presumed dead. I see a lot of my best friends once a year if I’m lucky and if we’re allotted time off from work and have the health, energy, or money to. 

When you give someone reason to question their trust, when you show the foundations they built their lives around, the dreams they imagined, the faith they clung to in moments of despair, are faltering, built upon dishonesty, half-truths, and you aren’t willing to address and answer for the gaps in your knowledge, even so much as to acknowledge them for what they are, then we have community after community where people are leaving and there is no incentive to not.

Even if it’s over substance (ab)use, saying you struggle or have struggled with these things are very much part of the human experience, even something that may have been beyond your control and stemmed from a surgery in childhood from a random sporting injury or something you have chosen to do willingly in adulthood, and shaming them, particularly when there has been political decision after political decision made to impact your life and your choices before you were conscious enough to recognize or understand (& even then, whether you had the time to ACTUALLY understand), helps nobody. 

We all need help sometimes. 

We should be able to emote variations of displeasure over lack of control. Whether it’s how another’s behavior was and is chosen to impact you. Who controls those dynamics and why does it scare you for someone to know you, vulnerable, and why and when do you react less than optimally, what outcomes do you consider as the most likely or possible or expected and how did that deviate from reality, and what are you afraid of if you lay it all out there, try to communicate, and it’s somehow not enough. 

But assumptions? Assumptions help no one.
You can make assumptions to potentially fill in details, or to make predictions, but you always, ultimately have to be aware of what you didn’t anticipate, variables beyond your control, outliers.

“Sometimes, we assume the worst because we fear to hope.” 
(Nenneke, The Witcher Season 2)

Assuming and accepting the current system is enough, is fearing to hope.

We should all be able to trust a system to protect us and one willing to consider and correct the consequences of their own (in)action, however well intended, and for that we need better leaders who are willing to communicate, willing to accept when they haven’t gotten it “right” and WHY, willing to lead, because of love. 

You might not like their methods, and you might not understand their judgment (or maybe you never cared to listen), but you have to be willing to keep trying and you should understand and consider why they wouldn’t automatically feel safe, trusted, or protected with you, even if your intentions are pure.

There is a reason why veterans do so much work with rehabilitating animals, after all.

Anyways, I just wanted to share this because in addition to how mentally and emotionally exhausted I am from the coronavirus pandemic, a lot of us have been exhausted for even longer, because of a much longer, more insidious pandemic encouraged and physically marketed and promoted with government insistence. 

I know it’s a big facet of public health to help yourself and your own community before you can help elsewhere, but after living, growing, learning and working in Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, the same problems, circles, and people exist everywhere. 

I can’t fix my own community because we have governments unwilling to devote or consider time or energy for these problems, and all of the medication and therapy in the world doesn’t change the unhealthy environments causing them or the communication issues. Treating health with temporary solutions, using bandaids when sutures are needed, is inept policy to its core. The point of government is supposed to be organization of administration, making the unpopular decisions because they’re the right ones to make or only you have enough information to do so and were elected to carry out that order with the intelligence available to you, and be able to trust that said government is acting in such a way to benefit the needs of its citizens–not the needs of corporations and not for government positions to function as methods of filling your personal pockets while passing legislation that harms your constituents and removing access to their knowledge of how you’re harming them, just because it’s “easier”.

At the very least, facilitate economic freedom and public access to knowledge such that people can afford to remain in and help their own. 

Our environments are preventable from reaching that level of disruption, disrepair, but with a good ole capitalist mentality of extracting resources and crushing what remains to rebuild in new glory, we’re causing more problems than we’re solving and the version of “success” is just money. Transactional. 

It’s not health.

It’s not happiness.

It’s not community. 

…It’s just cold, shiny, hard plastic. 

[*Rips the senior homecoming crown in half on stage after winning the state mathlete competition and throws it into the audience*]

*End scene*

Thank you all for listening, as always. Maybe it will help you understand the complexity of the mentality of addiction. How it relates and has been influenced, even over the last 100 years, via our public policy framework and history of warfare, and you’ll consider receiving the stimuli with curiosity and concern for why people and places reached certain states of disrepair, before you judge them.

…Shouldn’t be too hard since we don’t seem to hold anything accountable these days.

Please don’t kill yourself, though, if you personally struggle with addiction and came across this. Your social circles and activities of interest may change, yes, it may be unknown and scary and new, but you have to be willing to ask for and admit that you need help, and know that everyone’s reaction will be coming from their OWN perspective, and not to automatically believe it if it isn’t the method of help you were imagining.

Be willing to try as many times as you try “not” to kill yourself, whilst purposefully removing all of the memories of these incredibly amazing parties and people you claim to enjoy so much.

Go Watch Bo Burnham’s “Inside”.

Please just fucking speak to the people you love and care about and interact with if you’re worried. Remind them, first, that it is because you love them and don’t postpone and postpone it, nitpicking or lurking for signs confirming your fears, refusing to approach conversations with them with an open mind or being truly willing to listen, convincing yourself of the worst in an awful self-fulfilling prophecy of your own parallel of bad choices.

These are part of the human experience we’ve created as a “society”. Something humans have been participating in since LONG before western medicine–typically either incidentally, through word-of-mouth, or accident. 

Local public health departments are a good place to start if you need resources, or the SAMHSA hotline is free and confidential, 1-800-662-4357

You can find the entirety of the blog at www.survivalmode.guide or follow me on instagram @zedagrace. You can also cashapp, venmo, or zelle me for these 2 hours of your time which took many, many more of my own, all under the same name as my instagram handle. 

Sources:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02686-2

https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/treatment/intentional-vs-unintentional-overdose-deaths

https://www.facinghistory.org/nanjing-atrocities/judgment-memory-legacy/refuting-denial

https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/addiction-statistics

https://time.com/5752114/nazi-military-drugs/