?A Birthday Gift to You!?

Hey babes, I’m doing a reverse gifting this year. 😉

If you go to my website, up until the end of Wednesday 6/19, you can signup for a free membership day pass. That means for 24 hours you can read whatever you want on my website for free.

You guys have been awesome, and this gig has brought me so much happiness and fun in my life. I want to be able to share that on my birthday. Please, enjoy. <3

Now, if you happen to be interested in getting me anything this year, can I make a suggestion? There is an amazing woman (an MM reader at that) raising money for the 3 teens she has taken in. These kids are from difficult circumstances and are at critical points in their lives where they need help to keep them from letting their traumatic pasts decide their future. Patricia is doing her best, but life cost $$. I would love anyone looking to pay their good fortune forward to pay it her way to help her and her family keep doing amazing work.

Website update

So I had to switch back to the previous membership software on my website. I really wanted the new software to work. I had put so much time and work and damn hope into it, but it just refused to live up to expectations. No one could sign up. It would be these bouts of Paypal refusing to work with the software, and it was crippling everything. Last week after being contacted by another individual trying and failing to be able to sign up, I realized this wasn’t going to change and I finally dealt with it.

You’re probably not going to notice much different with the fix. I had to rebuild the shop page and products from scratch, but it looks spiffy. A few visual differences mostly in the member’s area, and the auto-renew now works. The software has updated since the last time I had it installed and they now have a marvelous cancel auto-renew button so people don’t have to go to Paypal to figure it out. The last thing I want is for people to feel trapped in a subscription (and on an equal level, this avoids people having to hunt me down to get what should be a simple thing taken care of.)

It was kinda painful to let the dream go of the other software, but whatever. At the end of the day, shit needs to function. So sorry I took so long in addressing this.

Bright New Future

So as I hit my birthday (it was on the 12th) and look at another year of life, I’m happy to say I seem to have finally figured the health problems all out. *fingers crossed just in case* I’m finally feeling like myself, aka, I’m obsessing over projects and feeling the creative spark. It has been so liberating after having felt dead for so long.

I touched upon this a bit some weeks back, but it was a topic just so life-consumingly miserable, I didn’t want to talk about it. Or maybe who I was when like that made me less communicative? I don’t know. But I’m going to go into it now because I seem to have found a tentative answer when it comes to emotional flat lining, aka apathy, I was living in the last months.

A Chemical Girl In a Chemical World

The last months I have been consumed with the hard reality that I am a chemical being, and when those chemicals don’t spark, life is not interesting. We don’t notice it, mostly because our chemical reactions are so damn distracting. I’ve had problems since I started my latest Parkinson’s treatment experiment March. It wasn’t apparent at the time. I was focused on all the ways I was getting better—and I totally got better. No more weird claw hands, or pain everywhere, or bouts of narcolepsy/extreme exhaustion. I was spending a lot of time training myself in how to just live again, how to slowly start adding in aspects of life to juggle. It wasn’t until April I started to notice something was wrong.

My body was fine. Strong, no longer wheezing in response to allergies—I haven’t taken an allergy med in weeks and I stopped the shots months ago. But I couldn’t get myself to work. I couldn’t get myself to focus. I couldn’t get myself to care about things. I could see it, forever observing myself as I had to force my body to move, to do what should be so easy. I didn’t care about anything; not my health improving, not the art I love to create, not anything. Rationally, I knew not doing things was detrimental to life, and it was only through rationalizing that I could make myself act. But I wasn’t depressed—I had been depressed for long years and I damn well knew I wasn’t that. I wasn’t anything.

I started chasing down the usual suspects, certain in something was the answer to this weird apathy. Allergies, PTSD and dissociation, hormones, drug interactions with my supplements, food choices messing up my gut biome. And while doing that, I was training myself on how to do things while not caring. How to get up when I had to tell my body to move instead of my body just moving. How to clean when I didn’t care if things were clean. How to make myself write, even if it was just a couple hundred words and I didn’t feel inspiration or emotion in a single one of them.

I thought about what it is to live, and in lesser amounts, die. I was not alive as I know living to be. I was occupying a body that wasn’t responding to stimuli. I thought it was only emotional at first; I couldn’t feel joy. I couldn’t feel intellectual curiosity. I couldn’t feel. I would find myself staring at a painting or listening to a song and feel nothing, no spark of anything. It was so broken because I remembered what I was supposed to be feeling but I couldn’t reach that place. During this time I understood exactly what is was to be a chemical being that didn’t get feedback from stimuli, and it was robotic and lifeless. There was no reason to be around because this wasn’t living, and I kept wondering how long it would take for death to take me now that my body was strong. How many years would I have to live like this, not caring, not loving, not laughing, not wanting or responding? The misery of being ill seemed somehow better than whatever I had become because even in that insanity, I still felt alive.

I suspected it was Parkinson’s related. Apparently apathy hits about 40%, and with it, for those with caretakers, it is probably the hardest aspect of the illness because the individual doesn’t care, doesn’t feel, isn’t motivated. They literally can’t engage in life and their caretakers have to endure it all. Here I was with early onset Parkinson’s, having found a way to cure every fucking symptom placed in front of me, but with one aspect so damning, I could easily see myself leaving my family to spare them the person I was becoming.

Then I got a new symptom, one that forced me to not give up, to work around my apathy and seek an answer. I started losing physical sensation.

A Little Background On My Wild Parkinson’s Experiment

So some months back in March I took a leap and tried something creative when it came to the Parkinson’s. I couldn’t find any info of anyone else trying it for a treatment, but I figured I’d see what it might do. I decided to make my gut bacteria work for me by seeding it with probiotics that produced dopamine. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work, but it did, beyond any expectation I could have expected. It was practically overnight, and I kept waiting for it to go wrong, but it didn’t. My body moved again, my brain functioned again. I could interact on levels I hadn’t been able to in years. You know how I was talking about the website fix? That took 1/2 a week when the fix before took 4 months. My brain and body were working and it was a freaking rebirth.

But something wasn’t right. One day I found myself standing with my hands in scalding water wondering why it didn’t burn, why I wasn’t moving away like the instinctual base animal I was. My tongue and throat had bouts of numbness. My fingers lacked sensation. My sense of smell was weakened. I would repeatedly poke myself with toothpicks to see where the numbness was, if it was getting worse, because all of a sudden it wasn’t just my emotions but my senses that were failing to get information to the brain.

I of course thought tumor or brain damage from the mold exposure. Combined with the lack of emotional response, I was suddenly seeing an alarming image of potential brain deterioration in aspects not linked to cognition. I looked into hormones (perimenopause was a suspect) and other neurotransmitters imbalance potentials like serotonin. Allergies too–numbness is connected there even if I hadn’t experienced that symptom before. Something wasn’t registering in the brain, wasn’t reaching where it needed to get.

I tried a few different experiments: eating spicy food until my numb senses would suddenly scream in reaction, same with hot water on the skin (not damaging levels) trying to stimulate a response, trying to see if whatever neurons were failing were still there to react or not. They were, and sometimes I would wake out of it, the same way I would wake out of my bouts of Parkinson’s before.

That’s when it clicked. It was just like the Parkinson’s, but new symptoms. Not an excess of pain but a lack, not an exhaustion or a weakness in the body, but not any excitement either. No cognitive issues but clearly some sort of brain hiccups where emotions and sensations failed to register.

I first tried increasing the dopamine, going back to my old standby of Mucuna just in case the probiotics and kombucha (made with neurotransmitter rich probiotics) weren’t doing the job. Then, after feeling just brief moments of humanity only to lose it, the desperation that came with being numb again inspired me to be more extreme and go off all dopamine support for a day to see if it was some sort of overdose. I had heard that schizophrenia was too much dopamine but none of my symptoms matched that, but I figured just in case, just to see. Really, what did I have to lose?

I started getting subtle emotions and sensation back, but at the same time, the Parkinson’s symptoms flared up again. I decided to compromise and just lower the dose. When I first started this experiment, I had looked at probiotics and probiotic drinks like a medicine, yet here I was drinking it like a staple now. I cut the dose and made sure I didn’t sip through the day, but instead had measured amounts at predetermined times. The Parkinson’s symptoms again alleviated (thank fuck) and I started getting trickles of me back.

Reactivating Reactivity

I found myself staring at a vibrant blue, outdoor wall a few days after I cut my dopamine dose down. I couldn’t even tell you why, exactly, because it wasn’t a shade of blue I could even say I like when in my normal state of mind. But there I was staring, straining for something familiar. The entire day I had been out in the world and had felt nothing, but this blue wall had garnered some sort of reaction. Something in the color sparked me. That evening, I had two arguments. Full out shouting matches. I hadn’t realized I hadn’t been feeling anger either until I found my emotions turning on. By the second argument, I was actually feeling something in my body during the experience.

If you think that sounds weird, the previous months when I smiled— well, when my body smiled… My body would have an impulse reaction to a joke or familiar happy setting and I would smile, sometimes laugh, and then stop. My face felt like a mask, fleshy and stretched, and that was it. I was observing myself wondering why the chemicals weren’t flowing. There was no feedback, no reward to the action of laughter or smiling.

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible for motivation. Now when you hear motivation, you might think big things, like having the grit to go after a life goal, or get a master’s degree, or what it takes to crawl out of a cozy bed to go to a crappy job every day. But chemical motivation is happening in every single thing we do. When you taste something, the chemical reaction is your motivation. You may not know it because you’re already trained to the Pavlovian response to expect a reaction as normal, part of the process. But if you had spent the last months the way I did, you would see that without a response to taste—be it registering taste, salivating, having hunger—you wouldn’t eat.

Without a chemical reaction in the brain, a sunset can’t be beautiful. Without the chemical reaction when meeting people, you might as well be alone. I found myself talking to someone who I usually enjoyed seeing, remembering how hyped up our conversations would get, but I was forcing myself through the motions, not feeling anything. Even something as simple as picking up an object: there is a reaction, a sensation, something that sparks in your brain to reward with information about the object, sensation, texture, pleasure if it’s soft and soothing, or pain if it’s sharp and bitey. As biological beings, everything we do is in reaction to real world stimulation, or the thoughts in our heads—and if a happy thought can’t make you feel anything, you’re not going to have happy thoughts. You’re not going to have any thoughts after a while because why bother? Without a chemical response, life is a big bowl of who gives a fuck.

Cutting the dose worked. I can’t say for certain why it worked but I have numerous theories. I didn’t realize dopamine couldn’t cross the blood/brain barrier when I first started the probiotic experiment. That means the dopamine being produced in my gut (although perfect to fill all the dopamine receptors in the body) couldn’t reach my brain. Only the dopamine precursors (amino acids from protein) could, and then the brain had to convert it to dopamine to then transport through the brain to utilize.

My initial theory is that by lowering the gut dose to ensure all the dopamine receptors in my body weren’t full, it allowed my body to send a signal to my brain to start producing dopamine there, which in turn started to reignite my senses and emotions once the dopamine receptors were receiving again. My second theory, after having read some interesting information about the thalamus in regards to Parkinson’s, makes me wonder if it’s not the dopamine in the brain itself that excites things into normal activity, so much as the signal that dopamine is low.

We are biological beings that need dopamine to function in basically all aspects of our bodies. You are looking at your screen right now because you get feedback from it that your brain uses to make dopamine. It’s why the phone is so addictive, why it’s so hard to put down little video games or how you can get lost in social media for hours without realizing it. When we don’t have dopamine, our bodies seek to create it. How? Through seeking stimulation and food that will lead to the chemical reactions that create dopamine. When dopamine levels drop, hunger kicks in. It may not be the dopamine itself that gets people motivated to act, but the lack of dopamine which then pushes people to seek out things that stimulate production of it.

A Sensory Obstacle Course For Life

So I figured out this ‘cure’ last Sunday, and although everything feels amazing atm, I’m afraid I’m wrong about it all and I could slip right back in to that terrible state of being. I’m working to stimulate my brain to ensure that it’s producing dopamine properly, because once you lose those receptors in relation to Parkinson’s, they’re gone. It’s been an interesting challenge (now that things can interest me.) I feel like I’m setting up an obstacle course for my life while totally trying not to look at it as recovering from brain damage. I’m trying essential oils for the olfactory senses, music for the ears, I plan on digging out my acrylic paints for visual stimulation, and at the core, brain puzzles and challenges to stimulate my intellectual curiosity. That one has been the easiest to feed now that it works again (fuck, I missed my curiosity T_T ) and I’ve been wonderfully frustrated as I try to teach myself Blender for 3D modeling.

Ha, that has been a total revelation! The battles I constantly have with my creativity— the neurotic, obsessive insanity I fall into as I slam against a wall trying to understand something new— that’s not just a habit of who I am; that is how my brain has adapted to produce dopamine. It liked clawing through tough challenges because that gave it chemical stimulation in reward. The insanity I put myself through as an artist is solely because my brain wants the best hit of dopamine it can get.

The body doesn’t care if it’s positive or negative stimuli; it just needs stimuli to have essential chemical reactions for life. Which probably explains why I’ve been snappish lately too. >_> Did you know anger addiction is a thing all because of dopamine? (This is probably why the world is so fucked. Anger is a chemical rush, and some people feed off of it. Talk about drama.)

Getting Back To Living

Long ass story short, I’m back, peeps. Mostly. (I fucking hope this is permanent. >_<) I’m still not 100% with some things, a lot to do with my drives and curiosity and ability to feel joy or even sensations. My time is going to be focused for a while on habit forming for stimuli in my life until I feel safe that my senses aren’t dying on me. It hasn’t even been a full week since I got myself back—it has felt like the longest week in some ways, though. When the senses kicked back on, it was so easy to just sink into experiencing life.

I expect once the newness of returning wears off and I have a positive set of habits to ensure I’m getting needed stimuli, I’ll be back to my proper writing schedule. I spent the first half of the week fixing the website and now just indulging in getting my ass kicked by inanimate software. I’m learning the 3D model stuff because I want an easier solution to make a fuck ton of gorgeous art so I can try my hand at a visual novel. It’s damn exciting to finally feel like I’m moving forward on that.

I’m already getting a feel for the tools and vocabulary of Blender 2.8 (free, btw, if you ever want to go play around with this stuff,) and I’m pretty sure my background in digital painting is going to translate well once I get this all figured out. There are even animation aspects I could utilize, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. XD I’m having fun (I can actually have fun!) and it’s just great to be alive again.

I hope you all enjoy this marvelous week. Even when things feel tough, remember that every challenge you face is also something that stimulates your body/brain to be able to experience life fully. Chemical beings live off of the downs just as much as the ups. There’s value in it all.

Comments <3

?Women Matter. Babies Matter. Stop Killing Us.?

Hey babes,

I’ve been reeling a bit. Writing and cleaning up Episode #1 of the PATB Serial. Some random, insignificant health stuff, but nothing worth talking about. There have been a lot of things I just don’t feel like talking about lately. I don’t like drama, I don’t like spreading needless pain. I don’t like having to hear the news and being pissed off and then making others pissed off. But fuck it. Let’s call this cathartic because I gotta talk about this shit.

I want to warn in advance… I’m probably going to say some offensive shit. It may seem like I hate men. I don’t, but I am angry. When you’re trapped in a system where you’re on the side being oppressed, it’s very hard not to yell about the side that’s not being oppressed the same way, the side that appears to have the power to change things if they would only try. I understand all too well that men are allies—I have amazing men, women, and non-binary individuals in my life who are freaking amazing and understand all too well the struggle we are facing.

But I also know not all men are allies. That there are individuals in this fucked up system who are more than happy to crush anyone with a uterus down, and some of those individuals have a uterus too. My anger is directed toward these individuals, but I get it. I cannot speak properly when I’m pissed off. I accept now I will say something wrong, many things, and I apologize to those who think I’m intentionally being insensitive. I am too sensitive right now, I care too much, and I’m being real to that.

I’m going to add some self care links and how to help links at the bottom of this. Check it if you’re not dealing well with the stress or are looking for ways to be proactive during this really shitty time. I feel shitty and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

As for those who are tired of hearing women rant about equal rights because they think everything is ‘perfectly fine:’ too fucking bad. Suck it up, buttercup.

Ready for a long rant?

Anti-women bills

If you haven’t read the details, here’s an article by Vox. (ref #AntiAbortionBillsExplained) It was written the 10th and since then, Alabama’s bill has passed with no exceptions for rape or incest. (ref #UpdatesOnReproductiveRights)

Anti abortion laws are sweeping the US state to state in a planned attack to overturn Roe v. Wade and take away a woman’s right to her body. I knew it was going to happen. We all fucking knew. If you were a women in the US when we watched an alleged serial sexual assaulter get elected into the Supreme Court, you knew this was the next war. And hey, the extreme, religious right knew too and didn’t disappoint.

I mean, if they were coming after our GUNS it would be a different story, right? Every ‘red blooded American’ would be screaming about their constitutional rights being stolen away. We have a right to GUNS! But a women’s constitutional right to own her own body? Crickets. Gas lighting. Bullshit pseudo science. We laugh at flat-earthers being out of touch with reality, but apparently lawmakers still can’t figure out how the hell a uterus works. No, we force our women to leave their jobs and have their bodies change in alarming, dangerous ways (ref #PregnancyChanges) so that they’re punished for having a dick in them. Not only can a man force a dick in a woman, but then she has to be forced to have her entire life and body change because of these bullshit laws.

So here we are with laws in place to imprison a doctor for 99 years if caught giving an abortion. Where the only way you’re allowed to have an abortion is if you don’t know you’re pregnant. Some laws are set to conception as a fetus being ‘alive’ and having a ‘right to live’ over a woman’s right to chose. And the six week mark of a heartbeat (of which it is not an actual heartbeat because a heart has not developed — come on you stupid fucks, open a biology book) is measured not by conception, but through a woman’s last period, so even there, no fairness.

For those who don’t understand basic female anatomy (ref #Ovulation), a woman must be ovulating to become pregnant. Ovulation happens before menstruation, 14 days, approx., meaning if you menstruate after sex, you have no possibility of being pregnant. (Some women experience spotting or a lighter period when first pregnant, meaning they may not even realize they’re pregnant till far later.) But for the majority of women, if she becomes pregnant on the day of ovulation (an egg is only viable 12-24 hours after it leaves the ovary, so the day,) that means she won’t have a period following. She will be measured by her previous period, which was 2 weeks before ovulation and conception. Sometimes women are late on their periods, or lose track of time (cuz hey, busy,) meaning the menstrual cycle she missed is already 4 weeks after her previous cycle. This gives her two weeks to realize she may be pregnant and decide on an abortion before the heartbeat law says she’s out of time.

I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty short timeline to figure out if you want to have a financial, emotional, physical, and social burden that will last for the next 18 years of your life, or if you want to get an expensive abortion (@$350 – $950 for a first trimester abortion) just because a condom may have been faulty. I had to wait 4 months just to get enough money together to pay for car repairs. That is a lot of pressure on an already stressful situation, especially if you’re not financially stable.

Not a lot of banks giving out loans for abortions. Note: If you need funding in the US for an abortion, check here. It was written in 2016, so a possibly outdated. (ref #AbortionFundingByState)

Forcing a serious decision like starting a family into a matter of days is irresponsible for all parties involved. The US has the highest infant and maternal mortality rate of any developed country. Mothers and born babies need help now, but these anti-abortion bills do nothing to address that. Because women don’t matter to pro-lifers. Babies don’t matter to pro-lifers. They don’t care about human lives. They just care about stealing control of a woman’s body while repeating the same old drone bullshit of ‘right to life.’ (ref #JudgeRulesGasLighting) Actions and where they send their money speak truth, and the ProLife movement has shown they’re only about forcing birth.

The blunt reality of the world is not all babies are wanted. Not all humans are suitable parents. Not all women consent to being impregnated. Nothing is sacred, not even life, and overpopulation during an environmental crisis is a shit show. There is no value to preventing abortion, only economic harm and the dehumanization of women into baby makers. So let’s jump into the consequences and realities.

How are women killed from criminalizing abortions?

Illegal Abortions

Women seek unsafe abortions which can lead to their death. In parts of the world where abortion is illegal, botched abortions still cause about 8 to 11 percent of all maternal deaths, or about 30,000 each year. (ref #IllegalAbortionDeaths)

No Medical Help

Women avoid doctors while they’re pregnant, putting themselves in jeopardy if the pregnancy goes wrong. When you fear being forced to follow through with pregnancy or being imprisoned over a miscarriage, you don’t tell anyone you’re pregnant. Plain and simple logic. Doctors are not an ally, but an informant for the government in such a situation.

In a life and death situation where a woman might be mid miscarriage, perhaps through a fall she had no control over, she won’t seek help because she won’t want to go to jail for a miscarriage. And yes, women have gone to jail in the US for miscarriage. (ref #AntiAbortionJailed)

Women may refuse to seek medical help at all if they have received an abortion in the past or miscarried for the same reason. One of the biggest problems in states that restrict abortion is how they also restrict education and support of women’s health. Without knowledge of what a doctor can tell when examining women, or how much you’re allowed to let them examine you, an uniformed woman will avoid it all to protect herself.

Some are only taught about abstinence and have little idea about their bodies and how they work, how to have sex safely, and how to not get pregnant when having sex. (ref #TeenEducationDrop) Few women even know that they don’t pee out of their vaginas! (ref #ThreeHoles) They are kept ignorant of their own bodies, safety, of STIs which they can spread blindly, and of their power to not be pregnant.

When a doctor is the authority of if you’re going to go to jail, you don’t seek medical help, which is exactly what these bills will result in. (ref #PoliticsAndMiscarriage)

Silencing Victims

Let’s not forget the silence around sexual abuse in families.

There are teenage girls being raped by members of their family, by adults, by men in positions of power over them be it financially or materially. These young girls are already at risk of being harmed or killed by their assailant. Now they have to fear being prosecuted if they seek help if they become pregnant, have had a miscarriage in the past, or are in the process of having a miscarriage because they were harmed while pregnant.

What if in being examined for sexual assault, they’re discovered to have miscarried in the past? No police reports would have been filed, and it’s unlikely any teen would dare name her assailant if it’s a family member and, bluntly, even less likely she would be believed because no one believes women when it comes to sexual assault.

These are at risk women who haven’t even gained enough self awareness to understand their situation, now learning that there are laws in place to help keep them silent about the abuse they’re enduring. After her right to say no is stolen from her, her freedom can be too by being imprisoned for feticide for not seeking proper treatment when pregnant. Because, yes, when they suspect a woman lost a fetus from neglect, they have thrown her in prison in the US. (ref #Feticide) (ref #SuicideInPregnancy) This puts these women in a particularly dangerous situations where suicide is the only option left. (ref #SuicideWithoutAbortion)

How are babies killed from criminalizing abortions?

High Infant Mortality

States with the worst anti-abortion laws have the worst infant mortality rates. (ref #InfantMortality)

So for clarification, we’re talking about babies, not fetuses. What is a baby? For starters, it’s born. Babies cannot exist in the uterus (unless one crawls back in. O_O)
(ref #Infant) Newborn infants are the youngest form of life outside of the womb, and if not for a mammalian mother or replacement, that infant will die from lack of nourishment or protection. Without a mother, a newborn will die without intervention.

Without a mother, a fetus will die. It cannot sustain itself.
(ref #Fetus) Nonviable fetuses cannot live outside the womb, and few viable fetuses are ever intentionally aborted unless to save a mother’s life. (ref #AbortionMyths) Viable fetuses who can survive out of the womb can be as young as 24 weeks, but even then, their survival rate is low even with medical intervention. They cannot seek food, can’t protect themselves; they need intervention to live. Many premature births lead to long term health problems for the resulting baby if they manage to survive. (ref #FetalViability)

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (ref #SIDS) is when an infant suddenly dies without explanation, but not necessarily without natural cause. Not all born infants will pass this stage. We have amazing medical technology, but some life just cannot sustain itself. Not all life lives.

Infanticide

“Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunter gatherers to high civilizations, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.” (ref #Infanticide)

Women who don’t want to be mothers, and don’t have access to contraceptives or abortions, abandon their newborns. Men who don’t want to be fathers, or family members who don’t want the women to be a mother, may take her baby away and abandon it to prevent social and financial strain. Instead of aborting a fetus, a newborn is left to die.

Child Abandonment

65% of abandoned children (who are recovered) are newborns. (ref #AbandonedKids) We have no idea how many newborns are actually abandoned in the US. The statistics is no better once we started the Safe Haven law because reporting numbers can lead to fear of legislative interference. (ref #AbandonedNewborns)

No one knows how many abandoned babies are unaccounted for. And to put it bluntly, when it’s a crime to have a miscarriage, women are going to stop reporting they’re pregnant at all. They’re going to stop going to doctors to seek help. They’re not going to be abandoning their babies in places where anyone could find out they were pregnant in the first place. Those babies won’t end up in a Safe Haven; they’ll be buried to prevent a woman from having to go to jail.

Babies will not be saved when women are forced to stay pregnant. They will be erased. (ref #ChildAbandonment)

The Cost To Care

Not all families can afford children.

16 million kids in the US are hungry. (ref #ChildHunger) 18 million kids live in single parent households. (ref #SingleParent) This suggests a financial instability that could be obtained with two parents— but not a judgment of if a single parent can raise a kid, just to be clear. Some can and they kick ass at it. Some can’t because of economic and financial realities that can lead to neglect.

Child neglect is a serious problem, one that could be easily avoided if women weren’t forced to have children they don’t want or can’t afford.

What is neglect?

‘Failure to meet a child’s basic needs may take any of the following forms:

• Physical or medical neglect. This is the most common type. It includes failing to seek appropriate and timely medical care for your child, failing to provide adequate nutrition, abandoning your child, and leaving him unsupervised at too young an age.
• Educational neglect. Allowing your child to skip school frequently is another sort of neglect. Also, if you don’t enroll your child in school when he’s reached the mandatory age, or you don’t seek special educational help if your child needs it, this may be considered neglectful.
• Psychological or emotional neglect. Harder to recognize, this type occurs when, for example, parents withhold affection from their children or ignore them. Occasionally, parents withhold affection as a form of discipline, but when indifference and inattention become the norm, over an extended period of time, then it is considered neglect.’ (ref #ChildNeglect)

Are foster care and adoption a solution?

Not really

I’ve been through the foster care system back in the 80’s. I was adopted. To the best of my young, traumatized memory, I was never harmed in foster care. I am very grateful to have been removed from my negligent, abusive biological home where all six of us were abused and starved (you could count the ribs of my brother, who had pulled the majority of his hair out in patches before he was five.) That said, foster care hasn’t really gained much ground.

Funding hasn’t increased to meet the demand of the society, and case workers are overworked and understaffed. Children aren’t being saved, they’re being neglected, tortured, and suffering needlessly. They’re not being removed from unsafe households, and some are dying right under the noses of the case workers. (ref #DhhsReform) Some are placed in dangerous group homes and dying there instead. (ref #FosterDeaths)

The number of foster care cases has increased every year since 2012, a large reason stated being the opioid crisis that has turned parents into addicts. (ref #OpioidCrisis) Most kids with autism will be thrown into the foster care system. (ref #AutismFosters) Same with down syndrome. Up to 80% of kids in foster care have mental health problems. (ref #MentalHealthFosters) 30-40% are in special education or special needs. (ref #SpecialFosters)

I know foster kids who never survived foster care. They died there. I know kids who have never gotten away from their abusive caretakers. Kids go missing from foster care and never found again, sold into sex trafficking or just outright killed. (ref #LostFosterKids) This is not new news; it’s just not talked about.

We like to think there is a net in place, that society has a place for lost children, that people care even if it’s not specifically us. We’re too big. We aren’t villages or families catching those extra mouths to feed. We are a society of millions too large to conceptualize saving everyone.

People may love, but they don’t care

To be painfully blunt, people don’t care. (ref #ApathyInSociety) They don’t care about suffering children. We have children caged at our border, and although we can write a hashtag about it, we don’t act, we don’t do, we don’t care. We have already given up feeling for those we can’t see because we know there is no obvious answer. We are looking at the bystander effect on a society of millions. (ref #BystanderEffect)

We can care about our immediate family, our immediate neighbors and city, but anything more is a stretch on the human psyche. The stress is too much. It’s ugly, but it is real. When we force children to be born to a society that doesn’t care, they will find little empathy or love.

The system is broken, and expecting it to pick up the pieces of shrapnel these anti-abortion bills create is unrealistic. The system can’t support the current population and there is no extra funding/support going into foster care with these bills. These bills don’t care about children, they don’t care about unwanted children, and they don’t care that these kids suffer without love and family and security. They don’t care.

This is not a healthy, caring existence for a human being. It wasn’t until I reached my mid 30’s, crippled with health problems that were exacerbated by the PTSD from my abusive household that I got appropriate therapy and eventual freedom from that child abuse. That’s 30 years of not living but being a creature of fear, reliving a monstrous moment that could have been avoided. As a self aware being now, I enjoy my life, I enjoy being alive, but I can honestly tell you I thought of killing myself many times before healing my PTSD because of that neglect, that lack of love, that failure of my parents to be loving people responsible for the kids they brought into this world.

There was no system in place to catch me, even though I was adopted, one of the ‘lucky’ ones. No psychological healing, no treatment that understood the scope of what was required when the very beginning years of my life were abuse, neglect, and detachment. Even with our knowledge, no system is being built to save and heal children who endured that kind of upbringing.

We are not a compassionate society, and that reality has to be acknowledged when it comes to forcing unwanted pregnancies to term. There is no magic wand to make someone into a good parent, or more, a willing parent. If they don’t want the job, they aren’t going to do it, or they’ll half ass it, leaving children to suffer. This is abuse that can be avoided.

How do women lose their freedom and rights from criminalizing abortions?

Bodily Autonomy

Women lose the right to their bodily autonomy. Their anatomy too, but let’s break it down.

‘Bodily autonomy is defined as the right to self governance over one’s own body without external influence or coercion. It is generally considered to be a fundamental human right.’ (ref #BodilyAutonomy)

When someone — anyone — makes a decision for a person’s body, unless consent is given, that is a breach of bodily autonomy. This goes from rape, to abortion, to forced marriages, to getting a tattoo, piercing, haircut, etc. This is what it means to be free. When you can make choices for yourself, you are free. When the government makes choices over your body, you are not free.

Anti-abortion bills, forced sterilization (ref #Eugenics), rape while under anesthesia in a doctor’s office (ref #DrRape), being imprisoned in asylums for hysteria (ref #Hysteria), forced to marry (ref #ForcedMarriage), date raped where men lie about wearing condoms during intercourse (ref #Stealthing), and child brides being married off to grown men (ref #ChildMarriage) are all ways women have lost their bodily autonomy throughout the years in the US, and this shit is still happening.

It has happened so much throughout our history, we don’t even know where the hell the line is to say THIS BODY IS MINE.

This is a wonderful article (ref #DefenseOfAutonomy) that sums it up well when it comes to bodily autonomy for a mother versus for a fetus. A fetus cannot exist without the host it is being created in. A woman is creating that fetus out of the resources her body takes in, and with pieces of her body. I can’t steal someone’s kidney to live; consent must be given. I can’t hook myself up to another person’s bloodstream to keep me alive; consent must be given. A fetus cannot grow in someone else’s uterus; consent must be given. That fetus is a non entity there on behalf of the woman, and yes, a woman gets to choose if that fetus can stay.

Even dead people have more rights to their body than a woman does when it comes to anti-abortion bills. You can’t legally take the organs of a dead person for transplants, but legislators would give a fetus more rights to a living woman’s uterus than that woman.

Baby Factories

Women are reduced to baby factories by these bills

Women have to have a baby ordered by law once pregnant, and they are penalized if they fail. And once the government has that right, where does it stop? They’re saying a women’s uterus isn’t hers, that someone else gets to decide what happens in her body. Will they outlaw hysterectomies? What about birth control because both will prevent pregnancy? Will they force women to have abortion, because maybe they don’t like the race or the gender of the baby who might to be born? Don’t think for a moment any of these examples haven’t already happened throughout the human race. Once this precedent is set, it opens up all kinds of bodily autonomy violations because a women’s autonomy has been legislated away.

This is the intent of focusing on the ‘right to life’ of a fetus. They are intentionally trying to steal a woman’s right away while pointing in a different direction. While they cry for ‘free speech’ they lie and steal choices away from women. (ref #ProTactics)

This is not about life

This is about restricting women’s rights

‘When Alabama Senator Bobby Singleton, a Democrat, pointed out that Alabama’s new anti-abortion law could punish those who dispose of fertilized eggs at an IVF clinic, Chambliss responded, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”’ (ref #ChamblissIsSexist)

They admitted it themselves; they don’t care about anything like ‘right to life,’ they care about punishing women, controlling their uteruses and forcing them to bear babies. If they cared about fertilized embryos, they’d be trying to protect them. It’s not about life. It’s about control.

When a woman’s legal existence is about her ability to produce children or not, she loses the right to her reproductive organs and to her freedom to not be pregnant. Men aren’t legislated down to their penises, so why should women be treated as walking uteruses? (uteri???) We’re not throwing men in jail for masturbating and ‘wasting’ their semen. They’re not being penalized for having vasectomies because they’re ‘preventing life.’ Who’s to say those little sperms don’t have more rights to stay viable in a man’s body than a man has to not ejaculate? Should we start writing some laws about how masturbation is killing God’s children?

Women are more than a uterus; ask any transwoman, any woman who is sterile, any women who has reached menopause, any women before she hits puberty, any woman with a freaking brain. We Are More.

Gaslighting Women

‘…women’s everyday experiences—and demands that we “prove” these experiences—have shown us the gendered nature of credibility.’ (ref #GasLightingKillsWomen)

Gaslighting is probably the most frustrating part of this situation and our current culture, one that is seen over and over and over and over again when someone who is not a woman thinks they can explain what women really want, what they really mean, what’s good for them, what they feel, how they think, who they are.

This is all the time. Since we have parents who ‘keep girls safe’ by preventing them from living full lives, or making choices, or experimenting and making mistakes, to when we’re adults and we’re still seen as little girls who don’t know how to think. Who need priests or doctors or professors to speak for us. Who can’t walk down a street without a man to protect us. Who can’t get married without daddy’s permission as he gives the bride away, handing her off to another owner. Where the father of the bride pays for the wedding because dowries are passe but we’re still about handing off our women with a price tag to ensure they know they’re a burden on society. We can’t even have sex without someone freaking the fuck out that we’re going to fuck it up somehow. (ref #CulturalSuppressionOfFemaleSexuality)

Why do these people believe women can’t think? Do our vaginas get in the way? For some reason our brains can’t function fully because we have uteruses? The old joke that a guy’s penis ruins his thinking is just that, a joke, while for women, we are legislated around our uteruses.

Women are not being listened to from doctor’s offices to government building to the workplace to the bedroom. And if you’re a woman of color? Forget about. What about a transwoman or lesbian? You already know. We all already know, no matter how much bullshit is said we’re just ‘sensitive’ and ‘imagining things.’ Just walk into an auto body repair shop, ladies. Step into any place where trade is apprenticed to the next generation of men, and you will know 100% that this problem has not gone away. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC, the post office. I have had professional business women looking to throw down money hit a wall the second they stepped into the ‘male’ industry sector.

This shit just doesn’t die. It doesn’t matter how educated we are, how successful, how strong, how supposed ‘equal’ the country has gotten, we are talked down to like foolish little girls who can’t string a sentence together.

Women are talked over and told our opinions don’t matter. That we’re just looking for attention or a payout. That when we’re raped, we don’t matter. That we our the fault of our marginalization because we don’t ‘speak up’ when oppressed, harassed, assaulted, and ignored. And that’s the thing: when the law ignores you, when every seemingly competent, intelligent person ignores you because of your gender in a society used to female marginalization, you don’t speak up. You know it’s a lost cause. Because that’s what being born a woman is. Less than. Nothing. An accessory depending on how pretty your face and body is. We can’t get the same jobs as men, and when we do, we’re paid less for the same (and better) quality of work. Women are still prizes to be won and targets of indignation when we’re not nice, or smiling, or playing mommy for every rando who looks our way.

Women keep having to prove their worth, prove their pain, prove their right to bodily autonomy. No one is asking men to prove rape, but they do of women. I knew a young woman who was told by a cop she wasn’t raped because she let the guy who drugged and raped her into her apartment. The guy was a friend from work who didn’t mention he was going to drug and rape her when he came over, but somehow it was her fault for being in a position where her power was stolen from her. She was supposed to be a mind reader, to assume that every man she knows is going to rape her, to be a victim her entire life because men aren’t held accountable for the things they do with their dicks. She must be accountable because men are never accountable in this society (unless they’re black, then suddenly black men are accountable for the irrational fear in total strangers heads.)

To be a women is to be in a place where you always have to prove your have a right to live. And when you get exhausted, screaming the truth again and again until you’re sobbing at the struggle, you’re called a manipulative bitch for having emotions and showing them.

We shouldn’t have to prove that our bodies are our own, but we do. These laws force us to have to fight to have our own uteruses, while condescending lawmakers shrug about not being doctors while passing bills based on medical lies and bullshit morality.

Being forced to carry a fetus to term is a punishment being placed on women for having sex. In a modern society where contraceptives are prevalent but not covered by insurance, where a male birth control has been made with great success but will likely never make it to the US, the burden is on the woman to not get pregnant, not be raped, not make a mistake with her birth control or have a condom break. And also, when it fails, it’s her burden to ‘be responsible and good’ and have that baby because society says that’s a women’s duty. To sacrifice herself, her body, her future for everyone who has an opinion on how she should live her life. She isn’t allowed to make that choice. No, they literally write laws to take her right to choose away.

You want to know about the power of the uterus?

A story that could easily be reality

So here’s a somewhat wild, totally empowering, absolutely chilling story of possibility. A power only those with a uterus have. What is the quickest, easiest solution women can take everywhere to solve this gender oppression problem? Stop bearing males. Yeah, you heard me. It’s not the close your legs and stop enjoying sex spiel. It’s stop giving birth to boys.

If even half the population stopped birthing males for 20 years, women won’t have to fight to vote for anything. One, because men would get the point by then, and two because there won’t be enough men to stop women in the upcoming generation. It would have no negative effect on future birthrate or our ability to have a stable economy because women can do the same jobs men can. Seriously, name a job only a man can do.

Pee standing up? There’s a tool for that. (ref #GoGirl) Grueling manual labor? Robots already do it better. (ref #DisplacedJobs) Marginalize women and mansplain? AI bots do it better. (ref #TrollBotArmy) Think? Ha. Good try. Really, you wish. Women’s brains are evolutionarily superior to lead. (ref #WebThinking)

And if this seems crazy extreme… eh. It’s a woman’s right to choose. Literally, it’s her uterus. It is her right to decide if she wants to make things ‘fair,’ by continuing a population of oppression where her voice is drowned out by a bunch of out of touch men who are legislating to take away control of her body. Or she could choose a change and see what happens in a women majority world. In a world where women exercise their right to choose, and they choose women first.

This is the power of having a uterus. Without a uterus, an army cannot be created. Without a uterus, population numbers can’t be grown so that states get representation in the government. An economy fails when there aren’t enough bodies to support it. Religions disappear when there is no one to throw money in the coffers— Oh, you were confused as to why religions hate contraceptives and abortion? This is why. Religion ceases to exist if they can’t force women to have kids. They need numbers because indoctrination is easiest when someone is born into it.

Women are essential to the balance of power because women have the power to create humans. With 1000 women and 1 sperm bank, you could have an army, but 1 women and 1000 men is a pathetic birth rate. You need a womb to have a baby, and more importantly, you need eggs. We can clone women, not men. Out of the two, eggs have the power. Something a woman doesn’t ever have to give away in the case of an artificial womb. (ref #ArtificialWomb)

Women have the power, and men don’t, and that’s why they keep trying to convince women to be weak, silent, marginalized, because that’s the only way a man can get any power. They have to crush women down so they forget their uteruses were how men came to exist in the first place.

It doesn’t even have to be bloody

The gene called TDF, aka SRY, is required to have a male human. It’s found on the Y chromosome in Y chromosome carrying sperm. (ref #TDF)

We already know the answer to prevent the birth of males without abortion or murder or anything quite so ugly. It’s basic selective breeding in choice of sperm. That’s it. XY males produce sperm that either have the X chromosome or the Y. Don’t impregnate with the Y chromosome carrying sperm, and you have no fear of having a male child. (ref #ChromosomalSex) Although, to the best of my knowledge, science has yet to be able to identify with much accuracy either type of sperm, I’m sure we’re not far behind on it. All it would take is identifying one male on the planet whose sperm fails to have the TDF on their Y chromosome sperm, and it’s game over.

Welcome to the modern world (or soon to be) of genetic manipulation and selective breeding. The natural genetic mutation already exists; it’s just a matter of if someone is willing to exploit it. Our technology is already here. The question will be how desperate women become when their bodies are taken away from them.

This probably sounds crazy

But isn’t it also just brilliantly delightful? Just a little thrilling? Girls, have you ever honestly realized how powerful your uterus is? We literally have the power to decide if the human race will continue on or stop in extinction. Just with our choices. You wouldn’t need war, wouldn’t need to nod your head at another fucking stupid thing some dumb as fuck old man says about ‘knowing your place.’ The female gender can continue on forever through basic cloning, and men could be left in the evolutionary dumpster because they refused to get their shit together.

This looks like a story of ignoring human morality to choose a gender. Except humans aren’t moral; they are irrational animals like every other mammalian species, and they do things all the time in self serving ways that are just as, if not far more, barbaric. You know why the stop bearing males solution is a wonderfully terrifying option? Because we tried it before in reverse.

China killed all their baby girls and is now at the brink of economic collapse. They now have too many men who have no opportunity to ever find love or have a traditional household. China is importing women in as brides, not caring if these women are willingly there or not, to try to keep from the economic cliff they’re heading for. China’s population when those men die — that big army and workforce they’re so proud of — is going to drop from the face of the planet with no one to replace them. But not before bankrupting the next generation as they age and their health care weighs on China’s economy of far fewer numbers. They better win the AI race, cuz they’re going to need robots to take care of all their elderly.

Men can’t create life — Poof. No power. Game over. Bigotry towards women led China right to that cliff, then pushed them over it because they didn’t respect the value of the uterus. (ref #ChinaFemaleInfantcide)

How to live in an unfair world without getting rid of all the men

Maybe we compromise and learn

If you’re not a fan of deciding which gender should be born, or you’re an individual who doesn’t have a viable uterus or are uninterested in birthing, a less drastic measure would be to vote. Vote for candidates who support women equality and reproductive rights. Protest. Be a voice that is heard until someone listens. Know your line, your body, and don’t let anyone cross it, and speak up when you see someone cross someone else’s.

This goes for everyone. We should all understand bodily autonomy and state our boundaries, that way there is no confusion of who has a right to your body. This oppression has been a part of society just as much as focused on gender. Children are raised extensions of parents, not being allowed to set their boundaries, not being allowed to make choices that reflect them instead of their parents. When a child is crying from being tickled, that’s an infringement of their bodily autonomy, the same as when they’re screaming and kicking to be placed down. (ref #MyBodyMyDecision)

At the earliest stages of life, we are already ignoring that everyone is an individual, and it’s one of the most obvious reasons our society then grows to think a woman is forever a daughter/wife/mother instead of an individual. Men face this same problem, forced into gender roles, expectation of financial success and appearance, all because we fail to see each individual and place nonsense societal standards on people. And everyone in between? Society tries to erase them. You can’t be disabled or elderly without someone somewhere thinking it’s perfectly fine to take away your bodily autonomy. It is not, and we as a society need to address this already.

This is a problem with every person, even if not every person is to blame for how we got here. This is a lesson we as a society are struggling to learn, but it is so important! We are all impacted by others not acknowledging bodily autonomy. When women demand to be treated as equals, it’s a demand that everyone is treated as an equal no matter their gender, social status, race, sexual orientation, ability, religion, culture, etc. This is about everyone even when the focus is on women.

Be genuine, loudly

No one thinks twice about women’s rights when women are silent. And how obnoxious people are in how they try to silence women when we speak up. Telling us our anger is unsightly, that we’re hysterical for caring about the rights to our bodies. How our emotions don’t matter, or are a weakness, or a weapon. Their discomfort in how a woman reacts is their way of shaming us into repressing our natural selves to fit their expectations that we’re supposed to be silent robots who just take abuse. They want us to be meek and polite and ask permission for the rights of our own bodies.

And the gas lighting! The gas lighting bs of how we don’t understand that every human life is precious while our lives are completely disregarded and trampled over and over is infuriating. How they tell us we should listen to those imbecilic tyrants who are trying to steal our rights away—Oh, yeah, I had a man tell me that recently. That I was supposed to listen to a total stranger about who should have rights to my uterus. That I should listen because men are the gatekeepers to work and I can’t make money without making sure I’m likable to men. Seriously, FUCK OFF!

Everybody owns their body. This is no different for women. No legislation has a right to own us, to turn us into slaves of the government and religious extremists who think their religion should be forced onto women’s bodies. (ref #ReligionOnAbortion) This ideology being sold as pseudo science, twisted to pull on your heartstrings, is all about religious based gender oppression forced on our bodies. Church and State are supposed to be separated. Bodily autonomy doesn’t bend to religious ideology, yet here we are seeing legislation being written to do just that. We have a right to be free of religious doctrine— a right to be free! —while they are writing laws oppressing women with someone else’s religion.

An interesting Jewish perspective of a woman who sees her religious freedom infringed by these bills. (ref #AntiJewishWomenBill) A pro-choice, choose-life Christian view, compassionate and educated. (ref #MoreHarmThanGood) Plus an absolutely in depth look at abortion rights in the US. (ref #HistoryProLife) When women had the right to abortion up to 1840, then had the rights taken away, only to have them restored with Roe v Wade in 1973. Then the Catholic led charge ever since to take those rights away, including their strategies to twist science and focus on the fetus’s rights while ignoring the women. How they created a movement of hate that made pregnant women into villains who were slacking their ‘responsibilities’ for daring to have sex, and nurses/doctors were turned into targets of threats and violence and death. Also, so much gas lighting. Telling women they were ‘traumatized’ from having an abortion and didn’t know their own minds, their own will, their own choices. Always, they speak for us while ignoring what we say.

Also, a long, extensive list of all the ways women are treated like imbeciles, and laws are subverted so someone else can tell a woman how to use her body. (ref #23Ways) This shit is so frustrating.

What is reality, and what is the story of reality?

A reality check

This is the main problem with this fight, one that is ignored or exaggerated by those trying to steal rights away from women. This is the problem with pretty much every aspect of the human world. People place concepts of reality over actual reality. Worse, they create ideologies and then twist scientific data to ‘prove’ those ideologies.

‘This can have a particularly pernicious effect when the ideologies that make their way into the science are then claimed to be results derived from the science. Those ideologies, now “naturalized,” have sometimes been granted added credibility because of their supposedly scientific derivation.’ (ref #ScienceAndIdeology)

Some people don’t understand evolution. Some people think we are designed instead of evolved. They force ideas like meaning onto our existence. They think women exist to have babies and to give life. They think women should give up their bodily autonomy to serve this supposed created purpose. They think humans exist to raise families, and that sex exists only to bring forth children. The big fight against LGBTQ(QIAAP) is because some people think our bodies are here to have sex for the purpose to create life, and that anything that goes against that story is an abomination.

This narrative is a fallacy, a fiction, a dream from an imaginative mind that conceptualized reality after observing a pattern and told a story of it. It is not real, and we have to stop making laws based off of these lies.

Human beings are killed every single day because of these backward, painful ideologies that look at a perfectly healthy individual and tell them they are a sin, that they’re destined to burn in Hell, that their very existence means some god in the sky hates them or they’re a crime against nature, and their only way to solve it is to die or never act the very way their bodies were evolved to act. Women are oppressed, marginalized, enslaved in abusive marriages, and castrated because some psycho told the men of their culture that women existed to give them pleasure, bear their children, and serve them on this earth.

This insanity has to stop. When lies take away human freedom, they need to be called out for the harm they cause and our laws need to step in and protect the citizens.

Humans are real, beliefs are not

Humans need to be protected from irrational belief.

We exist because we exist. We have sex because we find it pleasurable. If we didn’t find it pleasurable, we wouldn’t do it. Ask anyone who is asexual— when you don’t enjoy sex, you don’t have it, and it’s perfectly natural. (It you don’t enjoy it, it is fucking NATURAL not to do it! Duh, world. Really.)

Why should an asexual women have to give up the right to her uterus over someone’s belief that she’s supposed to be pregnant and bear children? Why should an asexual man or a gay man breed with a woman because someone said they’re supposed to raise a family? Why should any free thinking woman or man do anything they don’t want to do with their bodies?

We have babies because fertile men and women who have sex together either don’t have birth control, or make a choice to have kids, or aren’t being as safe as they thought and mistakes happened and abortions weren’t available. Or a woman went to a sperm bank, or entered into an agreement for in-vitro insemination. Just because our bodies can be joined to create life does not mean in any way we are obligated to do so.

It is a fantasy to see a uterus and assume it must produce a baby at some point in its existence. Just because an embryo can attach to the uterine wall and eventually develop into a fetus that may or may not turn into a viable infant does not mean a woman is obligated to see that process through. It doesn’t matter if a total stranger who is not that woman has a different opinion; it’s none of their business. That is that woman’s body, her uterus, her egg, her embryo, her fetus, and it’s her choice.

We are headed for an environmental nightmare

In a conscious, self aware society we are painfully failing to reach even in 2019, it makes more sense to not have children as we head toward an environmental crisis that will potentially lead to the extinction of the human race, if not many of the current species on the planet. (ref #It’sHot!) The amount of suffering humanity is headed toward with no stop in sight is so devastating, it would be irresponsible to bring more life into this mess until we clean it up first.

It is only through the advancement and equality of women that the human race can see a stabilization of population in the future as we work to repair the damage humanity has done to the planet. (ref #WomenAndClimate) If we can’t stop overpopulation, there will just be more people to starve, suffer, and die during the ecological nightmare that’s going to hit.

The unborn feel no pain; they do not suffer. It’s a different reality for those who live and gain self awareness. This idea of counting ‘potential’ life while ignoring actual life is offensive to those who have to navigate the trials of existence. No one is obligated/designed/required to create life. No one is even obligated to breathe! We do so because our bodies automatically do, but many have suffocated to death when they have taken means to stop it. Within the lie that we are designed to give life—the story that all life has a right to usurp a woman’s— our freedoms are stolen away to fit the ideologies of those who refuse to see reality.

I don’t bow to someone else’s irrational view of the world. No one should. I’m so tired of dumb, irrational people trying to tell me how to live my life when they can’t even see how much they’re messing up their own.

I’m angry and I’m tired, but I’m not silent

The thing about laws is they only work if society agrees. Society doesn’t agree on this (ref #AbortionPolls) and we won’t be silenced. It’s sickening enough the atrocities happening with the Trump administration and partisanship eroding our democracy at every turn. We’re in the middle of an ethnic cleansing in the US while people squabble over a border wall next to children in cages (because we care so much about life that we cage it and watch it die.) But if we lose the rights to our bodies, it’s game over for freedom.

Women aren’t going back. We have spent centuries being demoralized, fighting for a vote, a wage, for financial independence, to be seen as a person and not a wife or a daughter or an economic burden—for our voices to be heard. There is no going back, not when women all over this globe haven’t gained the rights we are losing now.

We’re done being grabbed, marginalized, and legislated by our pussies. While the zealot Republicans think they have a win, we have corporations who are run by women, who hire women, who survive off the money women spend on products. Events that require celebrity (many who are women) to bring in tourism. (ref #CorporationsReproductiveRights) This can be an economic war as well as a war on women. This can be a population war if it comes to that where women refuse to continue the human race if the human race refuses to treat women as equals.

This is the power of creating life; we don’t have to provide the bodies for another self destructive war. We don’t have to do anything. A sit in for peace can = a sex off for humanity. (I don’t know how to break it to you all but masturbation is awesome. Multiple orgasms without waiting for your partner to figure it all out is super nice. Women don’t need dick to enjoy sex.)

We have a choice no matter what any unconstitutional law states, and I choose to not be silent. Not now, not ever. This country is for all of us, not just an extremist few who would put us back in the dark ages with their draconian, oppressive laws. There is no love of life in these bills, only punishment of women and the babies who are born into a society who can’t see the consequences of their actions, be it in family planning or environmental stewardship.

I get it. Women have evolved to just grin and bear every horrendous atrocity committed against them, to put society first, to make everyone ‘feel good’ about how shitty women are treated. We have been told to utilize the power of our uterus is immoral, unkind, unloving (unless a man tells us to do it. Then it’s ‘God’s will.’) While we can be raped and silenced, we’re taught that fighting back is ‘wrong.’

I’m am sick and tired of being told society must come before my needs when I am part of over 50% of society whose needs are forever ignored. We still can’t get equal pay! How many years do we have to fight just to get an equal paycheck? Fucking seriously, it’s 2019! We are going to be seeing our jobs replaced by automation before we get equal fucking pay between genders.

Fuck society. Fuck being ‘fair.’ Fuck making everyone happy while women have to take a back seat once again. Fuck it all. Until society can see women as equal, women need to put women first. No one else will.

Self care when in a society that doesn’t care enough

Practicing Compassion

For those who are freaking out and need something to do instead of just vent at how fucking stupid the world is, I have a few links you may find useful. I have pointed out some seemingly grim, really terrible things about the world, but I need you all to remember, this too is just a story, a narrative made up of my fear, my anger as I take in information and let my mind and emotions respond.

As much as there is an apathy in humanity, there is a brimming of compassion as well. For as many Pro-Lifers who want to restrict and oppress women, there are those who truly, genuinely love the very first spark of life in a womb and they want to honor and protect it above all else. For those who weaponize their religion against others, there are far more who use their belief to bring their communities together. These are all truths, and as such, there is both so much beauty and pain in these human experiences as a result.

It can be hard to look past our emotions—as someone who had PTSD for 30 years, it can feel completely impossible. But it’s essential if we are going to make important decisions and be the best, intentioned people we can be. To look past, we must first embrace all the feelings that well inside us, every contradiction, every irrationality, every cry and kick of ego.

There is so much pain here, so much oppression. When you see what it is to be a woman, to be a woman of color, to be a woman born with a Y chromosome, to love a woman and to feel her pain and know there is nothing you can do alone to change this unfair world: there is pain. This anger and outrage and fear would not be here if not for all the pain these laws have weighed us down with.

Mindfulness

My way of dealing with pain and anxiety is through mindfulness. It was the bridge that stepped me out of a PTSD narrative and into reality. I truly don’t know any better tool a person can use to help get past huge emotional and psychological pain, and stop the fight or flight stress response.

‘Mindfulness allows us to interrupt automatic, reflexive fight, flight, or freeze reactions—reactions that can lead to anxiety, fear, foreboding, and worry.’ (ref #10Mindful)

(ref #MindfulnessForStress)

‘The essential cause of our suffering and anxiety is ignorance of the nature of reality.’ (ref #HowToCopeWithFear)

Steps you can take to help

For those who want to help, these are recent blogs I found with links to protests and funding sites.

(ref #HelpProtestAbortionBans)

(ref #HelpWomenInStatesBanningAbortion)

I don’t have links for this last one, but my fuck, I gotta mention it. Foster care. Seriously, these kids need help. I don’t have enough knowledge to know what is a reputable funding site at this time—honestly, I’m not even sure if funding is the problem. The whole system is messed up.

All I can say is listen to kids. Help them understand and acknowledge their pain by listening. You may never truly understand what it is like to be discarded for not being whatever ideal of perfect your parents wanted, but you can listen and show that even flawed human beings are worth everything.

My adoptive dad had this cute poster in the garage when he was alive. It was this little saying, and I remember every time I read it how totally wrong the grammar was. (Yeah, my nerdness started early. XD)

This poster wasn’t there for me and my brother, the foster kids in the house. It was there long before us, yellowed and aged, a poster for my dad. My dad wasn’t a foster kid, although my adoptive mom was until she aged out, and she was horribly abused during that time. When you grow up in a society that throws away people like they do trash, it can be hard to find self esteem in all that. My dad knew it personally because he was dyslexic, tormented and abused by the nuns because of it (it was not a compassionate time for learning disabilities,) and didn’t learn to read until late in life through comic books.

Society decides if people are ‘junk’ or not through their disregard and irrational ideas of what a person is supposed to be. We have to be better. In accepting our flaws, we accept us as whole, and it gives us a chance to move forward better, with compassion (and hopefully some wisdom.

There’s hope

A bill in Congress was introduced on the 23rd of May. I’m afraid I can’t trust the government to follow through, but I still hope.

‘The Women’s Health Protection Act: Equal Abortion Access, Everywhere’ (ref #ReproductiveRights)

As insane and intense as this all seems, it’s the same old story we’ve been dealing with since humanity dawned. We seek balance while others seek power. We seek freedom while others seek to use us. Nothing has changed. It doesn’t matter how much our numbers grow or our technology advances; we are still just manifestations of our biology and experiences. Until we can truly break free, the tide of power will keep pushing back and forth, or our lack of foresight will wipe us from the planet completely.

Still, as long as we can tell a story of the future that is worth working toward, there is always hope.

?A Sexy Fairytale and New-ish News?

Quick little check in today

I just wanted to let you know Wendy has released a super sweet book that’s a retelling of Snow White, but it’s sexy mm!

Snow of the White Hills

Once upon a time an imprisoned prince was rescued by seven beautiful men.

For two years, Prince Snow has been locked away in the palace tower. On the night Queen Serena decides to do away with him for good, seven beautiful men with equally tragic pasts appear out of nowhere to rescue him.

Starved for affection, hurt, and in fear for his life, Snow is shown attention and care he has never known. The seven men teach him what real loyalty and love can be.

Doc, their leader, will heal him.

Sleepy, the most devoted, offers to become his love until the end of days.

All yearn to fight to gain Snow his rightful throne.

But Snow cannot justify his new friends putting their lives on the line for him. His heart will break forever if anything happens to Sleepy. Maybe it would be better for all if he just left…

You will love Prince Snow, but you will fall in love with Sleepy!

M/M romance, non-magical fantasy, abduction, imprisonment, rescue, hurt/comfort, and a sweet love story with a happy ending!

Hey! 😉

Hope you all enjoyed your dead guy on a stick day, or weekend, whatever your thing is. My weekend was spent with my bf’s relatives (because holidays are created for introverts to be forced into utter discomfort to endure some pointless ritualistic exercise in tribalism. Totally XD)

Oh, and I have a new (but the same) venture! I decided I’m turning The Paranormal Academy for Troubled Boys into a serial. It’s crazy that the rewrite is just sitting on my website, waiting for me to hurry the fuck up and not have my health get in the way of my writing. It’s killing my motivation and I think the best thing is to start releasing this baby in 50,000 word chunks so that I can feel like I’m accomplishing something and not standing still.

Any betas interested in taking a crack at the first 50,000 words? I’m not rushing to publish if I can get editing help and be able to focus on my current writing as a result. But if I can’t (or I get twitchy like the irrational being I am) I may find myself rushing to get this finished ASAP so I can get back to the rewrite.

I even made a cover to light a fire under my ass. I based it off that original Demon Arms cover, but hopefully with a little more sophistication this time around. 😉

I’m really excited about this. When I first wrote Demon Arms, I wanted it to be a serial but I was super sick at the time. Then when I got to writing Shiny Thief, I had gotten to this place where I felt like I had to conform to the previous book because, well, it was already written. But in doing the rewrite, I’ve kinda unstuck myself from that limited thinking that hit me when I was sick. I want this series to be the best it can be, which means I gotta get past my blocks and limiting beliefs. I know I’m better with smaller goals in this sense that work toward a larger goal, and I think this is going to be the best way for me to get there as I get these books done.

Myer Briggs personality test

Randomness, but I took the Myer Briggs personality test for the first time after seeing it mentioned on a forum I frequent. I actually took it four times total on four different websites (I assume something like this can’t be fully accurate and wanted to see if there would be an average,) and got a weird, in between of INTJ/INFJ. The T and F are right on the line of who wins. I don’t know enough about it to know if that’s, I dunno, psychosis or just people not fitting into ranges. XD It does make me worry I can’t possibly be objective in the world when it comes to social situations if I’m seeing through a small filter of personality that is not shared in the majority of society. Feeling a bit like an alien today.

But anyways, now I’m looking at the personality types thinking this could be a cool way to come up with a new character. To be honest, I usually build characters up from their trauma of choice. (I know, I know, twisted, Sadie >_< PTSD has ruined my mind.) It might be interesting to have an underlying set of personality traits that work together with life circumstances and trauma to help decide how a character will react in a situation. Like a little cheat sheet of how a character might act based on personality traits.

I think it could be fun to try making a different system just for writing certain types of characters.

Okay, randomness done in newsletter form. Hope you all have a fab Monday ^.^ Oh, and yeah, any betas interested, hit me up through email or comment on the website! I’d love the opportunity for help and input.