?Kickass Atheists And A Ramble?
Hey babes!
So first, a quick check in. I’m trying a new experiment with my health, and so far so good. Things have flipped pretty drastically in a short amount of time. I no longer need allergy shots (we’ll see what happens once spring hits and the mold blooms,) and this is the 4th day straight I haven’t needed any dopamine supplementation for the Parkinson’s. I think I may have finally cracked this. I’m keeping myself aware—it’s all still experimentation until I can feel like this is repeatable and sustainable—but yeah, it’s looking good.
My key thought at the root of this experiment was the realization that it’s the gut that produces the majority of our neurotransmitters. Not through the gut itself, but the bacteria living there. If Parkinson’s is a sign of low dopamine (a neurotransmitter) and a ton of dopamine is created in the gut by our bacteria, then what would happen if I intentionally seeded my gut with probiotics designed to increase neurotransmitter production? AKA, why not farm my gut the way we farm the land to produce what I need to function?
The change was quick. Practically overnight once I started the probiotics and realized some store bought kombucha had the right bacteria to also produce neurotransmitters. I’m sure it helps I’m still on the Candida killing meds too. I have energy, and I’m more active in my life. I’ve been cooking (and eating) every day and I’m feeling really relaxed. I even started exercising on my rebounder again. I’m more active but it’s not that hyper energy I get when my immune system is flipping out. I just feel more me and more in my life.
I’m taking it slow, though. I feel like every time I push too hard when I see improvement, I undo the good. Which makes me think the extra neurotransmitters are helping with my residual anxiety. I’m really happy with it all so far.
I guess we’ll see how it goes. Hope is a double edged blade some days, so I’m just focusing on how nice it is to wake up on a Saturday, laze around, and still manage to write a Newsletter while also eating properly and thinking of creative stuff to do. I saw the Spider-Verse movie—the art style was so inspiring. My mind is a whirl of if I could do something similar in a visual novel. <3
Okay, some fucking kickass atheists!
I am in love with this video. If you’re bored and looking to see what it looks like when a brilliant atheist tears into an asshole who thinks homosexuality = aids, and homosexuality = pedophilia, check it out. What I love at the core is the message of freedom of thought and the problem with people who think a thought is an action. They are separate and don’t require judgment, something people really struggle with.
And if you’re interested in seeing an atheist view of sex work, and how even in secular spaces free of religion, society is still struggling with their personal shame when it comes to sex, check out this 9 minute intro—also, nipple at 11:46 😉
I’ve started watching things like the videos above because it is such a relief to find people who think like me. These concepts and viewpoints of the world seem like common sense to me, but I did not grow up with people who had common sense. The majority of the adults in my life were messed up and brain washed through social and religious means. It might seem weird that I see PTSD in practically everyone, but there’s a reason for that. I was surrounded by people who were traumatized, and these people never sought help. They just created a path of destruction everywhere they went. And I, a small child, was constantly being harmed by other people’s trauma.
Time for a personal ramble of my past
I haven’t done one of these in a while, but I’ve been thinking a lot about where the thoughts came from that I, as an adult, am forever clashing with. Unfortunately, they came from home, not some external source. At times it was influenced by external sources, such as the religion my family believed in. At the core, I was raised mostly through trauma, not nurture.
I grew up in an environment that didn’t promote thought. As a child, I didn’t really understand it, and I certainly didn’t understand what it was doing to me. When my adoptive mother would burst into angry tears because I would keep questioning her stances and offer other view points, I didn’t understand WHY; I just knew I got quieter and quieter to appease her. Her plea was forever ‘why can’t you just agree with me?!’
Well, why couldn’t I? More importantly, why should I? Why did I, a child trying to understand the world, have to agree with a grown woman to make her feel validated in the world? Because she was damaged. The same way my biological father would beat his kids when they didn’t act the way he wanted. He was damaged and he thought to control a child would mean he had control over himself. He didn’t. Why did the children always have to change to make these unstable adults feel stable? The entire thing is flawed and proposed by adults who are too damaged to see they are the problem. Unfortunately, children are beaten down to believe the lie of the adult in situations like this, and they spread it later in their own lives.
When my adoptive mother would snap at me for speaking quietly, I only got quieter. I was attacked for speaking up and saying the ‘wrong’ thing, and attacked for speaking quietly for fear of saying the wrong thing; the clear answer was to just never speak. Especially when I knew the stakes of speaking up, because I was a foster kid until the age of 10—my experience was if you pissed off your parents, they either sent you away or beat you. My adoptive parents did neither, but they threatened to plenty.
I was a foster kid who came from an abusive home, and I was adopted by well-intentioned parents, one of which (my mother) had been a ward of the state until she aged out and had endured terrible abuse during that time and after. Some of that abuse was inflicted on her by her husband, (my adoptive father,) who stopped drinking by the time we were taken into the house and was thankfully not the person of his past. Whether she intended to or not, my mother abused me in the same way she had been abused when it came to thought control, self esteem and emotional manipulation.
She set a standard in the household that I should be ashamed or disgusted by my body. That if my hair wasn’t to her specifications, I was a ‘hag.’ I can remember her absolute disgust when I got a new bra, and the way she pulled it down my torso, scathingly telling me it belonged lower—because when it was higher, my breasts looked larger (the horror.) When I spoke back to her, or just did something she didn’t like, she would say ‘you have the biggest balls I’ve ever seen.’ There would be such disgust in her voice, I only know now through observing the pattern through other people that clearly someone had said this to her as a child, and it had been gendered to assure that she would feel repulsed every time she stepped out of line. Girls were ‘good,’ and they certainly didn’t have balls. What defined good? Not upsetting others, and not being free like men. She used that against me in the hopes to break me from being my own person. She would tell me if I didn’t like living there, I could go live under a bridge. Because that’s rational—telling a child who had endured years of abuse that if you don’t conform in every way, you can go die on the streets.
My relationship with my adoptive mother was extremely toxic and it was not because I, a child, had established it to be that way. And to be clear, I loved her, just as I did my abusive biological parents, and my adoptive father (he favored materialistic manipulation over emotional.) Love is not stopped by things like abuse, trauma, pain. I can acknowledge someone was horrible in action and still love them whole-heartedly, even if I have no interest in being around them any longer.
I think that’s hard for some people; they can’t speak bad of someone—they can’t speak truth—because they fear they will appear unloving, so the truth festers away inside like an infected wound, unheard and ignored by their own psyche. It’s a psychological cocktail of misery that can create more repression and lies. When someone tried to tell me my biological mother was a saint when she did nothing to stop my biological father from hurting me, or my biological grandfather from hurting me, or refused to create a stable environment to prevent her small children from being at the mercy of any stranger who could be called a ‘foster parent,’ it just made the pain worse because it was bullshit.
Adults are not perfect, and some adults are really fucking terrible because of what they do to others, and yeah, I can still love them but I won’t pad the truth. And because of that, I can talk about this stuff and not be in pain anymore. I’m not broken by the truth because I realize people are complex, fucked up, and even when we try our best, we are not always our best versions of ourselves. When we can come clean about that stuff, we can move on to do better. But only if we can be honest. All the people I know who didn’t face their shit, never changed, never got better.
So, some weird shit about the mother I loved, the one who took me in and gave me a roof over my head when I was at my most vulnerable. My mother fought me for my adoptive father’s attention like a scorned lover instead of a mother—talk about awkward. I would have to walk home from school (a good 2 hour walk) if I missed the bus because she didn’t like his time after work going in any way toward me instead of toward her. She got upset when I had my plays or music recitals at school because it took him away for a few hours while she wanted all his attention. Asking for simple things like to be driven to a friend’s house or the mall was met with argument after argument, until it was easier to not have a social life to keep from battling her at every turn. She hated having other kids in the house; she wasn’t a fan of me and my brother being in the house either.
It felt like everything was a constant battle of wills with this woman, and none of it made sense. Why couldn’t I just be a person? She didn’t care my grades were shit, that I wasn’t adjusting to school, none of it; she just wanted me to conform to whatever she wanted and it made everything else so much harder. It took until the end of middle school for me to finally break her hold on me, and I think this was probably much younger than other children who break away from their parents later in life. My mother ‘washed her hands of me,’ aka, stopped telling me what music to listen to, what clothing to wear, stopped trying to ‘help’ me by crushing me down until I could barely move without her freaking out. She also stopped talking to me outside of guilting me for ‘bringing this on myself’ because I was too difficult on her. This was suspiciously around the same time her cancer returned. She could only handle one battle, and it was with her own body, and her punishment to me was to cut me out of her life.
She never told me she lost a breast to cancer before they took us in. She never got therapy for it. I don’t think my mother got therapy for anything, from her life changing illness, the husband who used to terrorize her, to the abusive childhood she endured. When I started washing her clothes as her cancer returned and progressed, I found her bra with the padded breast. I can’t even imagine having something so profoundly intense happen to my body and not share that with my child, to not try to teach about illness, about the body and how it doesn’t always look how we want but we still have worth, still have value. But my mother never sought help, and she did not have a healthy perspective of what it meant to live in a body.
My mother had turned me shaving my legs into such an ordeal—seriously, she got my doctor involved—that the kids at my school who were making fun of me for having hairy legs unlike all the other girls were told by a teacher that I didn’t shave because it was a religious thing. No, it wasn’t religious, my mother just couldn’t handle my growing up. She couldn’t handle talking to me about tampons or menstruation. When I had severe, and as I know it now, not even remotely normal cramps, but horrendous reactions to the mold in the house that would send me screaming for 2 days straight every time I got my period—she would call me weak and throw it in my face how I’d never be able to handle the pain of child birth. (I’m likely barren, actually, from what the mold did to me.) My mother instead pointed out how she would go to school every day even though she also threw up every morning. Because she was strong.
That was how I learned just how damaged my mother was. Not with long, meaningful talks about her past, but these little moments she would bring up and use to stab me with guilt and shame as she bitterly tried to keep me from the reality at hand. She was winning a game of who could hurt who the most I didn’t realize I was in; I was just being a kid.
If I had been in pain for something not ‘womanly,’ I’m certain she would have handled it different. If my knee was twisted, she’d get me to a doctor. But it was my uterus, and it was a subject off limits. I needed help and instead of seeking solutions, she would attack me for needing help. The reason being, in her mind she did the same thing to herself. Her normal was to hate herself and blame herself for not being able to control her life. And I learned because of years of that treatment to be just as cruel, just as apathetic to myself.
I can clearly remember one day me coming home from school to find my room ransacked with my mother standing there with my latest library book in hand. I was a heavy reader—I read to escape a very unhappy life—and she just started screaming at me, and screaming, and screaming.
The book was for young adults (of which I was one,) and discussed things like puberty, making out, potential sex in the future for the characters, etc. I can’t remember what my mother actually said, just the disgust twisted on her face as she screamed at me for reading such a book and how filthy it was. The hilarity being, she totally missed the romances and books that had masturbation and sex that I had already read by this time. My mother actually wanted to give me a book about sex, a book that never materialized, and one she mentioned when I was 17. Because she was so fucked up about living in a body, so fucked up about sex in general, and so fucked up with her identity and needing me to be a reflection that she couldn’t face any of these basic things.
We could never talk, never connect, because she never treated the demons in her past. I had read books about cancer, specifically of a daughter my age dealing with her mother having cancer, before she even told me she had cancer. I was learning more about my own life through books because she was avoiding me experiencing life. When I was in high school, and her cancer got so bad I would come home every day after school to take care of her, cook for her, walk her to the bathroom, etc, we didn’t talk like people, like a family, like friends. I could either share her interests, or not exist. I had to be perfect, or upset her. I had to be perfect, or I’d be letting her die. I had to be perfect, and I could never be me.
It’s not unique
My childhood wasn’t particularly unique in the long run when it comes to being born into abuse, into religion, and into needing to adapt or rebel from a controlling parent. It certainly isn’t unique in being treated so apathetically that I learned to do the same to myself. What is unique about me, and it makes me so sad to realize it, is compared to the people I am surrounded by, or once were (I left a lot of broken people behind) I was the only one I knew who was striving to deal with my shit and gain a new life. I strove to break free of the thought control that lingered from people who were now dead but were still managing to fuck up my life.
So, when I see videos like this, of someone who understands the world in complete rationality and is also CONFIDENT in the perspective, it is beautiful to me. Because I wasn’t allowed to see the world the way I wanted to, the way I did, without waiting to be struck down on so many levels—and don’t even get me started with the all knowing God who would condemn me to Hell for merely thinking.
It’s a wonder I didn’t grow up to be crazy, yeah? It’s a fucking wonder anyone growing up in a restrictive religious household, or an abusive one survives to be any sort of adjusted adult. Our reactions to the world and our basic ideologies are established when we are at our youngest and most vulnerable, and this is when we can be least protected and least seen. This is when the adults in our lives don’t realize their stress and fears becomes a child’s literal perspective of life.
I can’t be in a crowded kitchen because both my adoptive parents were always freaking out with being crowded in a kitchen when cooking. When I first started dating, most of my reactions were to lash out at any show of emotion in my partner because my mother made me believe emotion was weakness, and that other people needed to stop having emotions so I could feel safe. Why the fuck should other people’s emotions have anything to do with me? Because my emotions were perceived as an attack by my mother on her. It is absolutely irrational, but it was the world these damaged adults created, and the one I spend every day trying to break apart so I can live healthily.
I want to enjoy reality. I want to enjoy my voice, which still sometimes gets quiet when people show up to freak at me because I see the world differently than they do. I don’t always feel confident in speaking my truth, but I do still speak it. I want that confidence. I want that place of stability to know if I say something that upsets people, too fucking bad; I won’t end up on the streets without my mother’s love.
I am not the keeper, the caretaker, or even remotely responsible for other people’s emotions, and I have no interest in trying to manipulate those emotions in any way. It is not my job to make other people feel good about themselves, and it’s not my job to go away because people don’t want to face the reality of a difference of perspective. Too fucking bad for them.
I talk a lot of shit about the LGBTQ community when they are acting shitty. When you have ‘real lesbians’ telling bisexuals they’re not really into women, or ‘real gay men’ telling trans men they can’t exist. When the community says gender doesn’t matter, then freaks the fuck out when they discover the gender of someone is not what they thought it was. When still, those within the community abuse those who are different in the community because they, like my mother, need everyone who looks like them (or identifies like them) to be just like them. No person is alike, but still we try to crush people down to fit into what we conceive them to be, and it is shit. In a community trying to break free of labels, there are so many fucking labels!
I get it; it is extremely hard to see past the false realities pain and strong emotions create. I had PTSD for over 30 years. I know damn well. I wanted people to be what I thought they were so that they made sense and I felt like I had control. But I also know what happens when we don’t try, and what happens when we get lazy and just shrug off reality as being less interesting than the many distractions or addictive anger and constant victimization. I still battle biases, still put a wall between me and people because I fear emotional manipulation even now.
I would rather live in a void than go through something like what I did with my parents—and that’s fucking tragic. Human beings are social creatures, and my coping strategy that got me through a difficult time in my life is still being habitually used to destroy my ability to connect. Because someone once told me to suffocate myself was a sign of strength, and when desperate for love, I believed them.
Reality repeated
It is beautiful to hear other people describe the world as it is, instead of through the lens of a broken, brainwashed human being. If you’re well adjusted (I’m sure such people are out there and congratulations!) it might seem boring and mundane, but damn, I have heard so many skewed versions of the world full of pain that creates more pain, and I’m just tired of it. I want the bullshit to be gone already. I’m tired of entire institutions and societies promoting fucked up ideologies that make little girls feel like they’re nothing, and grown women feel like their only worth is in how good they can moderate the feelings/stresses of others, or through stereotypical gender roles. There isn’t a single movie out there lately with a female main character that isn’t torn apart because she’s a woman. The pathetic old cry of ‘gender doesn’t matter but don’t go shoving your female equality in my face by being equal’ just won’t shut the fuck up already.
I want to hear reality, every damn day, until people can distinguish they are hearing reality and not another insane ideology that only lives in the brain. This is the education the world needs. Every human being should be able to find the base reality and see through their own bias. When you can see reality, you can live in it—you can alter it like I’m doing with my health instead of waiting to appease some imaginary divine being to heal me, or appease a doctor in a lab coat who was so certain my problem was something else and believes I should conform to that reality instead of fixing the problem. When you can start in reality, you can distinguish when your brain chemistry is fucked, understand the thoughts you have (be they depressive, anxious, irrational predictions of the future, etc,) aren’t real, aren’t from you, and you don’t have to act. You don’t have to give up your life because you know where reality is, and that unbearable situation you feel trapped in can be left just by walking away or turning off your screen.
We need more reality and less irrational ideologies. We need more loud, proud atheists who are willing to shut up a homophobe who hides behind ‘stopping aids’ as their rational of hate. That’s the world I want to be a part of. I don’t want to apologize for irrational thought; I want reality repeated.
~Sins
Thank you so much for sharing your valuable experience. Although I never experienced the abuse that you endured, I was raised in a family that viewed the world with fear and isolation. Although always genial and willing to help others , there was a wall around “us” and a suspicion and fear of “them “ and how they could take advantage of you. Displays of affection were weakness. Anger was respected. And being “right “ was the holy grail. It took the losses of both of them as well as the end of a twelve year relationship to finally open my eyes and my heart to others. Unfortunately, as I age in this f’d up society (I’m 64) I’m afraid I’m slipping into cynicism rather than critical thinking about the future. But your tenaciousness and no-holds-barred calling bullshit is a welcome validation that others see what l see and feel what I feel. And for that, as well as your talent, I say “thank you.”
Joe, that sounds really painful and frustrating, because I’m sure the ‘us vs them’ mentality has completely shaped your relationships in life. I’m only recently realizing my identity as an outsider is completely self created, shaped because of my difficult childhood and because I take different paths than others. I could be connecting more, being happy with myself and others if I just stopped believing I need to be separated from the group to be myself, or that I’m intrinsically weird/different than others and therefore need to keep my distance instead of giving them the opportunity to get to know me as is.
It’s amazing how our bodies change as we age, how our circumstances change, how our ability to survive and take care of ourselves change, but our perspective of the world can still feel trapped in the times when we were kids. I see Facebook posts with adults who have their own kids jokingly saying ‘I need an adult!’ but there’s still a little truth in those moments when yeah, you’re in a fully grown body, hopefully with experience and life skills to survive, but sometimes you still feel like you’re fumbling through life trying to figure it out. Because that’s all we’re doing. Guessing about the best way to live and hoping we don’t fuck it up.
I hope you can break through your old habits. I don’t think it’s ever too late to see the world differently and to start making meaningful connections. It might feel uncomfortable as fuck (it sure does for me!) to try and break the old habits, but there are rewards to trying something new, even if it’s neuron growth and a better sense of community (cuz I’m a nerd. XD)
Thanks for reaching out and sharing. I’m sure your experience isn’t unique and there are people struggling to get past the same problem out there. It might not ‘solve’ it, but it can feel nice to know you’re not alone.
I grew up in a loving Cristian home. (non-denominational) My parents encouraged questions. My dad was (he died last year) a genius and he either had the answers or logical hypotheses that just made sense to us. We would even make suppositions together, even getting silly. Creative thinking was always encouraged in our home. If they didn’t know something, they’d say so. Then they’d try to find an answer. Fortunately for me, they’re truly were/are Christians, and not just going through the motions/paying lip service like so many. They actually have Christ and love in their hearts. God’s greatest commandment for us is to love “our neighbors” and “our enemies” as we would ourselves. Since we already love our friends and family, that means “love everyone”! No exceptions! Even politicians! XD So, those who act out of hate and malice and claim to be Christians are not. No one can be born a Christian (sorry Catholics). I chose to accept Christ into my Heart. I’ve never doubted His existence, nor God’s power. But that’s me. ^_~
BTW, God wasn’t referred to as a male until the bible was translated unto English. Before then, gender neutral pronouns were used. It doesn’t make sense for God to have a gender, so I believe doesn’t have one. ^_~ I know you’re an atheist but I wanted to share this quote by Stuart Chase with you: “For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.”
Remember, you are LOVED! <3 I love you, God loves you (really, God loves all of us!), and your fans love you! ^_~ (I wish I could hug you, tell you how much you are wanted and valued in this world. Geez, I'm crying now ;.;)
Hey Patty. Thank you for the beautiful response.
I’m glad you had such an encouraging, loving upbringing, and it’s wonderful to know you are spreading that to the people around you. We all need love—I think it’s one of those things that when children lack it, they can’t fully thrive. Emotional deprivation can lead to infants failing to thrive, and my twin brother and I fit into that category. Things only changed because we were placed in foster care and taken in by our loving (but very flawed) adoptive parents. They did a lot to ensure our bodies grew stronger even if they couldn’t do the same fully for our psyches because of their own limitations. When I better myself, and do the work to heal past their and my previous limitations, I’m hoping in some way I’m helping to create a path others can know is available so they don’t feel trapped in their circumstances as well.
I once believed God loved me when I needed a creator figure to cling to to provide the love I wasn’t feeling elsewhere. I was around 9-10 years old when I really started believing in a God. He/she was essentially my imaginary friend, but unfortunately, it was a toxic relationship. As much as I filled my heart with the belief that this being I could never see, hear, or know loved me without question, I saw what man and God had done in the past, what role I was being forced into because of my gender in the name of God, how those with different sexualities were being oppressed and outright murdered, and how morality was a load of bullshit in most cases that hurt so many and was being dictated ‘by God’ to prevent free thought. My parents, my church, and my society were all using what I thought was MY GOD to influence my thoughts and beliefs about what God was, and turning it into very dangerous, very painful thought control that left me hating myself while loving a being that didn’t even exist (to the best of my knowledge.)
I think God is a coping tool that many of us utilize to help us deal with the pain and fear of living in a universe that has no meaning. Our minds seek meaning—it’s the essence of our thought process. We believe there is cause and effect, and if we study effect we will eventually find cause and take that next jump and place ‘meaning.’ And forgive me for taking this course of conversation—I think atheist day has just gotten me in the mindset of it. I like to think—and I love that you were raised to think! I truly envy that. This is in no way an attempt to change you and your beliefs. You love God and hurt none, and you are absolutely allowed. Love is a beautiful thing, even if we cannot hold it, or hand it to someone, or even see it. We feel good when we love, and we feel good when we feel love, but I believe love is something inside us the same way God is inside some people. Love is a chemical reaction we enjoy, that we then call love, and it can be romantic to platonic, but it is something that only lives as a chemical reaction in our bodies and doesn’t require it to be reciprocated—for anyone to even be there for us to feel love.
The same way you feel these wonderful, caring emotions from reading my story and as you think of me, those feelings are being built off of words you have read from a screen and your mental perceptions and emotional reactions. That’s it. And yes, that is certainly enough to feel those chemicals where the world is glowing and your heart is in pain because you empathize with another human being, but you’re truly—as we all do when looking at our phone screens or computer screens—empathizing with yourself as you fill in the blanks from a flat, 2 dimensional object displaying symbols that your brain has translated into words and then complex concepts and emotional reactions. You’re adding what you perceive me as a human being to be in there to make it feel like you’re meeting a person and empathizing with them. Humans are amazing in that capacity—we can love anyone and everyone because of that—but it can also be a downfall. The same thing can be used to scam people, to bully them to suicide, to make them trust someone enough to give them money, etc. And most of the time, people miss they’re reading words on a screen and the mind is filling in the entire experience.
Consider just the variety of perspectives. There could be a group staring at the same view of a forest, and while one person sees a forest, another sees a cluster of trees, another the splendor of nature, one person may see a memory of their child vacation of camping with their family, another may see their fear of wolves ever since they saw a horror movie, and one person may see God in the beauty of the view. What is actually there in that view? Trees. Soil. Perhaps some water or bushes or small animals. What is there, and what each person sees doesn’t always match, and it’s not because they’re seeing something that isn’t there, but instead adding something that only exists in their mind.
We are all limited by our perspectives. The same way the Parkinson’s injured my brain, and I couldn’t see that damage until I was healthy enough to look back and compare what I did as damaged verse healthy, some people see God everywhere because they filter their perspective through a celestial smear. God is everywhere they look because they have their God colored glasses on, but it’s not resting on their noses just changing their view of the physical world, the filter is in their minds, changing the way they think. Can you see God, find God, believe in God if you didn’t already have the filter on your brain? Your quote by Stuart Chase says it all. Believers don’t need proof because their brains are changed to see what they wish no matter where they look. Non-believers, in contrast, don’t have this perception filter, and because of it, they can’t see God because God is not there to see.
If you have never removed the God filter, you will never have an objective view of the God filter. I had to be outside my brain damage to have the vantage to see the damage (and no, God is not brain damage. @_@) It doesn’t make the God colored view of the world and of your thoughts any less beautiful—it may even make it more beautiful—but it also doesn’t mean that the filter is true, just that it changes the perspective of everything a person sees.
Apologies if you find this offensive. It truly is my curiosity of the mind and humanity, and nothing to do with what is true, or right, or moral, or anything at all. My cat is actually dying at the moment, and I think I just want the distraction of thoughts. She was getting better (or so, we thought) but she’s spasming now in our bed, unable to support her very little weight, no longer drinking water or anything. I’m grateful she’s had such a good mood these days, comfortable, not in pain. The degrading just seemed to hit her within the last few hours and the household is quiet and contemplative as we wait.
I hope you have a wonderful week, and keep filling your heart with so much love. It is a wonderful feeling to live in. I find it funny when people ‘decide’ that they have to suffer most of the time—they literally trick themselves into placing meaning on pain so much that they refuse to leave it—when we can just fill ourselves with love and bliss and enjoy being alive. Now, at the most, is all we truly know we have, so best to enjoy it.
Will you be writing anymore books? Or finishing the academy series?
Hey Ginger. I’m writing, and have been since I last published. I’m currently working on the paranormal academy for troubled boys. You can catch a sneak peek of Shiny Thief if you’re curious.
https://www.sadiesinsbooks.com/free/shiny-thief-preview-1/
Thank you, Sadie Sins. I love your so-called rants. They always make me think. The addition of the youtube videos in this one was unusually eye-opening. I am not an atheist so I would not normally be exposed to this type of video but I am so glad that you posted them. So thank you for growing my world a bit more. The added bonus was that the 2nd video helped to make me aware of how I was hypocritically shaming a family member. By this, I mean that while I openly advocate for sex workers in general, I became aware that I had been avoiding a family member because I didn’t like the way that she was using her body to make money. I am truly grateful for this being brought to my attention and I will attempt to do better with her in the future and make amends for the past. So once again, you got to me. Thank you.
Vicki, that’s awesome. I’m so glad something like that could help you see yourself a bit. There are so many messages that bombard us throughout the day and just stick without us realizing it, especially social messages. It’s good to know where you stand on stuff, cuz it’s easy to get lost and confused. It doesn’t mean your ideas may not change as you learn new information and grow, but it’s good to have a foundation to know when you’re acting against your own beliefs.
It’s why I’ve been enjoying watching that particularly group, if only because I enjoy how they cut through the bs of people’s narratives. We tell ourselves these silly stories (yeah, coming from an author XD) about why we think something or do something, but the stories don’t make sense, or don’t have any basis in our actual reality. I know I’m still fighting internal shame cuz of my upbringing, and I just have to keep reminding myself that the things I were taught aren’t helping me love myself and others. When I can live my love, and not just speak it, I feel like I’ll finally have made it out of the dark, you know?