Steven Wilhelm

You can only come into possession of it by exploiting a broken system. Imagine you are hired as a custodian for a small school and they are going to pay you 10 dollars an hour. If you diligently work your job then you definitely earned that money right? Now what if they decide to give you a raise to 100 dollars an hour. You’re doing the exact same work, so are you earning the 100 dollars an hour the same as you were earning. What if it’s 1,000 dollars an hour? Our current system would have us to believe that things and work are worth whatever someone will pay for them but I believe this is one of the most fundamental problems within our system as it is now. Just because you found yourself in a situation where you were able to make an exorbitant amount of money by doing something, does not mean that you should be able to find yourself in that situation. It is possible rather, that the system is set up in a way that is unsustainable and unjust, and I believe that is 100% the current state of affairs.

Within our current system, you have many people getting rich by basically being a menace to society, i.e. wall street, much of big pharma, and the like. On the other hand, you have many people often struggling to find any kind of financial stability at all while trying their best to do what’s best for the world, i.e. artists, humanitarian workers, mothers, and all other unappreciated people. This, in my mind, comes right down to the the problem I have laid out, that things and work in this system are assigned value based on what other people are willing to pay for them, not their intrinsic value. Fighting for racial injustice isn’t worth less than investing money in businesses you care nothing about just to make money from them. The system may be designed in such a way that this is how they’re treated financially but in terms of value to society, one is trash that is destructive to society, where the other is invaluable. The fact that their monetary values are inverse of their actual value to society is a grotesque and total failure of our system.

Back to our analogy about the custodian. What has happened in our current society that allows billionaires to exist, is that they’ve been given that 1,000 dollars an hour gig, or in the case of Jeff Bezos, for the year of 2018… It was $11,166,666… an hour… an hour…… an hour. It took me a second myself to realize that that was in the millions, not the thousands. This means, he was making 1,540,229 times a minimum wage worker at the time which was 7.25 an hour. There isn’t a single thing a human is capable of doing, that makes their work 1 million times that of the average worker, nothing, especially on a fucking daily basis for years, and yet our system allows it. Now you might be asking, what does it matter, what’s wrong with someone making so much money? The problem is, unless you are adding as many resources to our system as the wealth you are attaining is worth, you are reducing the share of available resources there are to everyone else. In Bezos’ case, you are doing it at an astronomical rate. Allowing such disproportionate distribution of wealth to exist, causes worse and worse inequality to occur, which studies show is one of the absolute, most potent causes of societal instability and/or collapse. Said distribution also allows many things that just shouldn’t exist at all, like most of wall street if not all of it, to be some of the most incentivized things to exist within our system.

In conclusion, my thesis is thus: we need the monetary value of things to be DIRECTLY tied to the intrinsic value of things if we wish to be anything close to a just or stable society.

Something my mom used to say was “work gets in the way of everything” and OMG is she right. It takes up SO much time, and then when you have time you’re just tired, what the heck? How could anyone think this is OK? I want to do my part to continue our species’ existence but it just…. does not… have to be this way. We do not need to work so many hours, we do not need to have ANY jobs that someone can’t comfortably live off of, we do NOT need a system that makes it so hard to be happy. Go ahead and say ” well it’s up to people to make their own way” because sure, yeah, whatever, but how the fuck does that translate to ” let’s make living as HARD AS POSSIBLE because people are responsible only for themselves and the system has no bearing on how many people are happy”??????????

I had a thought today about the concept of “responsibility.” I hear so many people say “we are only responsible for ourselves” when I try to talk about systemic barriers and mental health. Their conclusion seems to be that despite any obstacles a person has to overcome, where they end up is solely their doing. This just… sits so so very wrong with me. How can we as a society be so callous?? How?… like yes, It is hard to help people who don’t want to help themselves… but have you ever stopped to think that maybe, if you had lived their exact life, with all of the conditioning they experienced and all of the predispositions… that you would have ended up EXACTLY where they did and made the EXACT same choices?? If there is even a sliver of this being possible, it means that our current concept of “responsibility” is quite flawed and is currently being used to basically damn people for things that they are not the sole reason for, if in many cases much of a reason for at all.

I believe that we should stop caring who is “responsible” and just focus on who has the most power to fix it. With a lot of people, I genuinely believe that about their only way to getting better, is help. Because of the specific combination of hurdles they endure that ME AND YOU PROBABLY DO NOT… they just aren’t able to decide to get better. It’s 100% the equivalent of telling a quadriplegic to just stand up and they’ll be better. It just does not work like that. This means that they need help. This also means the only way they could get better is if someone helps them. Of course even with help it’s hard and the person has to eventually learn to want to help themselves BUT they have no way of doing that without the help in the first place.

This ultimately concludes to something I do not apologize for believing which is WE ARE IN PART RESPONSIBLE FOR ONE ANOTHER… If someone could have a better life and YOU choose not to help them, then YOU are in part responsible for their suffering, not just them. How… How have we gotten so wrapped up in the idea of individuality that we do not see the desperate need to act as a community. Can we please start seeing the failure to help one another of as much of a failure as not making a profit? Better yet, can we move profit WAY down the totem pole of priorities and raise things like well being, happiness, enjoyment, health, community, enlightenment… Just WTF? We can do better than this. We can and will do better than this, but it’s going to take, among other things, people being brave enough to stop looking for the silver lining in EVERYTHING and being willing to consider that maybe some things… are just bad… and we need to fix them.

• 

I don’t really feel like writing today but I am going to try. I am a little focused on what it is to exist right now and more specifically, my own existence and my relationship with society. I know I trash talk work culture a lot and I want to clarify something, I do value getting things done, I am not apposed to using my body as a tool to do things, I am however apposed to feeling like that’s my only purpose and being treated like that’s my only purpose. I believe most people do want to do things, it’s just that our society is set up so backwards that it often hinders motivation.

I really hate how much of what life asks of me often makes me feel lethargic, it sucks. Often times I hate myself when working and it takes every ounce of energy that I have to get myself to even stand up. What’s odd is that it’s not always like this, it’s usually when I feel like a slave rather than a person; it’s often when I feel like I am not given a choice. When I am given a choice and not forced to do things by other people, I usually have no problem working and even do better work. I’m tired of a society that treats workers as machinery and I am tired of society calling people lazy who don’t want to work. This system does not value people.

Also, mental health exists and not everyone endures the same life so please, do not ever say this garbage ” well, I did it, so can you.” I am going to condemn anyone the next time I play a guitar solo that they can’t if they say that. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and this applies to things many people take for granted within themselves, like the ability to decide you want to do something and then the ability to just do it. That is genuinely extremely hard for some people and society at large needs to understand this. Anyways, that’s this week. Working on myself and just tired so really I am glad I could write at all.

• 

I know many people will disagree with me here, even in the polyamory community, but I truly think that poly is the next step in the evolution of human romantic relationships. Much the same way that relationships for the sake of love were the next step from relationships for the exchange of property (with women being treated as property back then which was beyond disgusting and sadly it continues in many cultures today). I believe that poly is a much more healthy way for humans to exist. I also believe that the jealousy we feel when dealing with our partners being with someone else comes from our own insecurities and literally nothing else. I believe we have made a solid effort at rationalizing that jealousy and monogamy are somehow “sweet” and desirable, but truly, I don’t think this is the case. If jealousy, and therefore the desire for monogamy, does in fact come solely from insecurities, then it is in our best interest to not create our ideals around it but instead work past our insecurities.

Because of my view of love, I think we grossly misunderstand adultery. I think adultery is what happens when people with very strong poly drives grow up in a society that praises monogamy. We put said people between a rock and a hard place, and I believe those people are truthfully most people, it’s just that some people are better at forcing themselves to feel unfulfilled than others. Biology has shown that our romance hormones do not usually persist though our entire lives for any individual person, but rather they come in waves. This makes sense for our evolution because it would allow for diverse and abundant procreation. Since we are not wired for monogamy, trying to force monogamy creates a serious problem for both for individuals and society as a whole. I truly believe this is why so many relationships fail, it’s not a lack of trying, it’s being set up for failure. Judge a fish by their ability to climb a tree and it’ll live it’s life feeling like a failure.

I get people’s desire to cling onto old ideas of what love is, I mean, it can feel so right in a moment, and it’s also very hard to see things in such a contrasting way compared to how we’ve seen them since forever… but I am honestly here begging you, please, try to see the world through a lens other than the one you’ve looked through your whole life. I really think this is a huge structural problem in our society, we put so much stress on one person to be our ” everything” when they just don’t have to be, there are so many people around us, all of whom can offer different things. Want a lover to play music with, you got one, want one to play chess with, you got one, want one to sail across the Atlantic with, you got one. We don’t have to compromise. You might say ” well you’re just being immature wanting everything, love is about sacrifice” and to that I say, no, just because sacrifice is sometimes a part of relationships does not mean you have to go looking for sacrifice, and what the hell is wrong with wanting to experience as much of life as possible? Nothing, nothing is wrong with it.

I really want to do more research on this topic and more importantly live it in my life, but all that will come in time. I truly hope for a world where poly (and also unrelated but related, non gender centric relationships) are the norm. It makes me so sad seeing so many people experience heart ache when I just can’t help but think it all boils down to a broken system and an absolutely ungrounded expectation of ourselves and relationships. If we’d just take two seconds and look within ourselves at what causes us to desire the relationships that we do, we could see there is a rhyme and reason to it and it’s called human psychology, and in better understanding psychology, we can better understand ourselves and maybe learn to pursue things that are much more holistically fulfilling.

P.S. I want to say I have another theory: maybe we could make monogamy work if we designed an A.I. that could help us find the person that is our absolute best match but idk if that could work. I believe if it is possible, A.I. would be able to figure it out. Maybe poly is the step between now and then.

• 

Today, I just don’t feel like feeling. I think I’m tired of people, I think I’m tired of being able to predict people’s comments to my ideas in all modes of conversation, I think I’m most tired of people not making a priority of changing. A lot of people say they prioritize growth within themselves but what I’ve observed is that they will change the easy things to change, but they’ll never take a look at their deepest problems and so those remain, making it feel pretty hollow when they say they are open to change. It’s hard to appreciate someone’s ability to change in some ways when the thing they do that hurts you or others the most is something you can’t even talk to them about because they are SO not at peace with it or themselves about it.

I just want change, I want change to be a common place thing, I want it to be bare minimum to be considered a functioning member of society, and I mean REAL change, the kind that it fucking hard because it involves you acknowledging the parts of yourself that fucking suck, we all have them, and if you think you don’t, that within itself is one of them, so there’s one for your list. I get that change is hard, it’s really hard when you have no self esteem because you can’t afford to hate or dislike yourself anymore than you do, this is why kindness is so important, but not enabling people is equally important so it’s necessary to find some kind of balance.

Please, don’t even leave a comment on this if you aren’t actually trying to hear me out, I don’t want to have conversations anymore with people who are just there to give their own perspective without trying to see someone else’s. I want a life where when I talk to people, we are both there to listen to each other and where we are BOTH as ready to change our perspective the instant we are given good reason to do so. I am so tired of dogma I cannot even put it into words, it is a plague upon this planet. Evidence based reasoning or gtfo.

Anyway, that’s a rant, I want to find myself and I’ve spent so much time just trying to survive that I never really let myself be who I wanted to be. I’ve just tried to keep the peace… and I am done with that shit. I don’t want to hurt people for the sake of hurting people but I will not let cruelty exist in my presence without me saying something about it anymore. I also encourage people to criticize me because I know I am only human as well, I know there are infinite things I do not know, but don’t expect me to just accept any advice you give me because that would be assuming you know everything. We all should take in the information around us and try to sort through it the best we can while being aware of our own biases when sorting, that’s all we can do.

Saying that men are men and women are women is about as solid an argument as saying Pluto is a planet because Pluto was a planet; we changed the definition because the old one proved impractical. Like, I understand what people are trying to say when they say a man is a man and a woman is a woman but I believe they misunderstand a core principal of language when they make that argument and therefor completely miss that said argument is 100% circular. The principal they are missing is that words and their meanings are arbitrary, we made them up, that’s literally how language works. Definitions cannot be used as arguments because they are arbitrary.

FYI, Pluto changed classification because we found quite a few other celestial bodies around Pluto’s orbit that fit into our previous definition of a planet and we are also quite sure we will keep finding more. This meant we either had to add them all and any new ones discovered in the future to what we consider planets which would have very easily gotten out of hand as we continued to find more celestial bodies… or we could just change our definition of a planet. It’s not like we no longer recognize Pluto’s existence, or the other newly found celestial bodies, but rather that at least for scientist’s sake, it is easier to not classify them as planets. Changing Pluto’s classification is exactly the same as changing what we decide to call a man and a woman, because we made those words up just like we made up the word planet, only planets don’t give emotional weight to what we call them so there’s a lot more at stake with what we call people.

I once saw Ben Shapiro make an argument against people being transsexual that at first seems like it could be solid but under further inspection is nothing more than a half baked sleight. His argument for being able to call yourself a different gender than you were given at birth was this question he asked to a young person ” well, why aren’t you sixty?” to which the person seemed dumfounded. It is true that said person cannot choose to be what the word “sixty” represents which is going around the sun sixty times, just like someone born with a penis cannot choose to have been born without one… BUT… a person absolutely could say they want to change the definition of the word sixty to not be explicitly someone who’s circled the sun x amount of times. This is what is happening now with trans people and all of genders, we now realize our previous classifications of people are more hurtful than helpful so we are changing them. It is literally that simple. We can and should change words when they no longer benefit society.

I am not a trans person so I cannot speak to the emotion they feel when being called a gender they do not associate with, but I believe I understand the logical part of one way trans people might feel and that is that broad labels hurt people. I believe the strict adherence to a sexual dichotomy not only hurts trans people but truly it hurts all of us. So many people have aspects of their personality that don’t fit the gender that society has ascribed to them and so they will often oppress those aspects of themselves to better fit their assigned gender and I just find this sad and truly disgusting on anyone’s part who supports this mindset. There is literally no point in this. It hurts people. If I want to wear a sparkly rainbow dress but was also born with a penis, why…. the fuck…. would you care?

At the end of the day you might say, “it’s only really referring to genitalia so what is the problem.” The problem is that you and I both know that while technically speaking that is the only real requirement to be considered one or the other, there is so much more attached to those words like “strong, rugged, tall, hairy” for men or ” short, soft, kind, caring” for women to name a few of endless lists. As stated before, this causes a situation where people try to fit into those categories lest not be a considered a man or a woman, and as many people have found out, they’d just rather not be considered a man or a woman because 99.999999999% of people have traits from both completely arbitrary pools of characteristics, but since not being considered a man or a woman is pretty alienating in a society that fervently wants to classify everyone by one or the other, they’d rather change the definitions of man and woman… which we have… and are… because words are made up and when definitions prove impractical………… we change them.

P.S. Another great solution is to either abandon the idea of genders altogether or create endless genders which I am all for both and so are plenty of people. Wouldn’t it be great if we only saw genitalia as like who has a big nose or not… you know…. completely meaningless except for in and of itself? This is what I will be fighting for.

Today I almost forgot to write my blog so thank you Grandma for reminding me. I forgots because I’m about to make a trek to Texas AND we got SNOWWWW for which I love. I have a few reasons that I love snow and I don’t know which is the most potent. I think the O.G. reason is that growing up, snow meant no school and since I loathed going to school it was just such a good feeling to read “no school for Pulaski County” on the TV, especially the night before. There was something special about sleep knowing you don’t have to wake up in the morning. I think I’ve been a night owl most of my life so going to school at 8am feels a lot like forcing a morning person to stay up till 3am…… every day. It’s beyond exhausting. Society is built around the morning person extrovert and it needs to be more accommodating, because people are hurting in the meantime. Another reason I love the snow is it usually meant I could play outside with my friends all day which was just so amazing growing up. I am very grateful for many of my childhood memories and playing in the snow with friends. Another another reason I love the snow is because as a car person, snow means drift, which is the holy grail of fun in a car. A huge reason I have a Subaru is simply because it goes in the snow so well and as an AWD vehicle it is AMAZING at drifting. The last reason I can think of for why I love the snow is that it slows society down. I have a fair bit of chronic anxiety so when it snows, and all the hustle of existence is forced to slow down and take notice of the world, and more importantly there are less people outside lol, it just feels so right to me. Anyways, that’s it for this week, don’t have a lot to say right now and need to get ready to move. See you next week. ❤

For so many reasons, but the ones I want to focus on today are how much it is a hinderance to prosperity and how it can be a feedback loop to the lack of opportunity. Money makes money right? What does that say about a lack of money? I’ll tell you exactly what it says, it says that the less money you have, the harder it is to make money. Take for instance the act of buying literally anything; when you have little money, you buy cheaper things right? What is a pretty reliable rule when buying things? Cheaper means less capable and less reliable. Truthfully, buying a cheap car can cost a person more money in the long run than buying an expensive car in the first place. Also take for instance the laptop I just got. Had I gone for a cheap one to save money, it would have been less capable and therefore I would be less able and/or less motivated to do things like write a blog, record music, or possibly make some YouTube videos.

Here’s something even worse, the existence of poverty is bad for everyone. Having cheap stuff in existence at all wastes all of our resources. How much metal is wasted by filling junk yards up with old crappy cars, how much landfill space is used by “single use” cheap items that just shouldn’t be in existence? Too damn much. Imagine how many resources we’d save, and therefore free up for better endeavors, by ensuring everyone got as good of a thing as possible especially when it comes to essential items.

I think I am personally aware of this principle because I did not grow up very wealthy (not poor though) and so I currently find myself wanting to fall into the trap of saving money any way that I can. This manifests in so many ways, some just downright unhealthy; I try to save money buying cheap food, not going to the doctor, and not getting mental counseling, to name a few things. I feel like I try to save money for two reasons, most of the time I genuinely just don’t have a lot of money, and then the times that I do I am still conditioned to buy cheap stuff and that is hard to unlearn.

You can just say ” well just make more money right? Here is my question? Why are YOU willing to have a society with so many people wasting all of our resources just because they won’t get a better job? That is bad for all us, because our resources are finite. Never mind the fact that most jobs suck ass and treat people like machinery. At the end of the day, there aren’t enough well paying jobs for everyone but there ARE enough resources for everyone and we’d be better off if there were fewer extremely well paying jobs and more just comfortably paying jobs. Our current system guarantees that there will always be some people in poverty because it has less livable paying jobs than people. Our current system is incapable of giving everyone a comfortable life because it is built incorrectly, not because we lack the resources.

As an atheist, I don’t believe there is some grand purpose ordained by a creator. To some, this seems like such a bad or sad thing to be mourned, and I understand that way of thinking when coming from a place of believing in a grand purpose to existence. I considered myself Christian for the first 22 years of my life and so I understand how weird my current belief system looks coming from a theistic one. Now that I am where I am, I can easily say this hard to word sentence: I think that believing in no grand purpose created by someone else or some deity has far more potential to breed a happy, healthy society than believing in one does. I think it gives us the ability to actually question our goals and change them accordingly if we think they aren’t worth pursuing. I know most theists will say “well we could never create a goal better than ‘insert chosen deity here’ can give us ” and if that’s your stance, you should probably stop reading here because anything I say further in this particular post won’t make any sense to you because I am working on the assumption (backed by data and an entire topic I am not discussing in this particular post) that any goal set by a deity was actually just set by some person who believed themselves to be talking to a god but in reality where having a conversation with their own conscience where they believed their conscience was in fact a deity.

I currently see our society as one that is slowly coming to terms with its ignorance about the true nature of the universe and existence, but is still in many ways operating on relics of the past such as superstition or intuition (I do think intuition can be useful but one has to be careful of their own biases when relying on it). With every passing day, science shows us more about how weird the universe actually is and how wrong we’ve been about so many things and how intuition cannot always be trusted. With these growing pains that we’re experiencing, one of the things that is really taking a hit is our sense of purpose. Before religion came along, the purpose was mostly trying to find a way to just survive, then came along religion and it became listening to the ideals of ‘insert deity here’. At present, we seem to have a decent handle on survival and are getting better and better at seeing the gaping holes in religions, so now many of us have began to wonder, what the hell are we doing here?

As to our origin before the big bang, I haven’t a freaking clue. Seriously no idea, and that is simultaneously scary as hell, and mesmerizing to me. However, as to our purpose or what we should be doing, I have a guess, I think it’s up for us to decide. I think our goal is defined by us and always has been, it’s just that people weren’t aware of it for quite some time. For me, I have currently decided my goal is to maximize collective happiness/content and minimize suffering (the definition I am using for happiness here treats a masochist experiencing pain as happiness rather that suffering). I also extend this to as many species as logistically possible; I don’t view humans as any more important than any other species and think it is as morally corrupt as being a racist or a sexist as it is to believe we are more important than any other species.

I personally would like society to now come together and start engineering societal systems with clear defined purposes. I also think most skeptics and non-religious people could get on board with my stated ideal goal for humanity. With such goal, I think from here on out we should stop hanging onto policies based on preconceived ideals and only pay attention to whether or not a policy achieves our goal. One really big thing that kills me about our current society is how we value “work”. We seem to see getting things done and being “productive” as the highest of ideals, but I don’t think this makes much sense if your idea is maximizing happiness and content. Yes getting things done gives us more to enjoy but sometimes and often times really we run into diminishing returns. There comes a point where only focusing on getting things done begins to reduce the amount of enjoyment that work itself can bring, and at that point I think it’s important to slow down and not work hard just for the sake of working hard. One way this manifests is in automation, currently when something is automated, at best it frees up a person from one task so that they can do another and at worst it takes a job away from a person and funnels more money straight to the top of a company. I think there is a third option that should really be considered… I think the goal of automation in all cases should be to free all people from the need to work to exist so that they can choose what to do with their life. The wealth created by automation should be shared equally by all humans and not just used as a means to make even more stuff (although sometimes that is beneficial when that’s what the people directly making the stuff want) or to make a few people extremely rich while leaving the rest of us just above poverty.

It’s hard not to ramble on this topic because part of what I’m really trying to get at is that I feel society would be better off if we spent more time scrutinizing and adjusting our world models to get as close to representing reality as possible. I think there are a lot of commonly accepted “truths” that are either way more complex than we give them credit for or that are just blatantly false. The more we operate from ideals that are in alignment with the truth, the healthier our society will have the potential to be. I hope we continue to discover where we are just ignorant and learn to be a society that seeks out and readily welcomes change because nothing is more fatal to a society than an inability to admit where we are wrong and change accordingly. So in conclusion, me personally… making a priority out of learning and changing when I am wrong while also choosing to pursue happiness for myself and others is the vast majority of what I am doing here.

First off, I want to say how exhausted I am from having conversations with people who don’t even want to try to understand something that they themselves don’t experience. What’s worse is when people do experience some mental health issues but think that just because they can cope with theirs that means everyone else can. It is literally like living in a world of constant gaslighting where everyone is telling you nothing is wrong when something very much is. Could you imagine telling someone that their paralysis is just a thing they can get over, they just need to stand up? That is exactly what you sound like when you tell someone with any mental health issues to just act like they don’t have them or just “do something, it’s not that hard.” It absolutely is that hard… for us… just like it’s hard to stand up if you are a quadriplegic. You wouldn’t gaslight them, so don’t gaslight us.

Next, something terribly heinous about mental health issues, at least clinical anxiety and depression which is what I can personally speak about, is how it itself is a barrier to getting help. The very motivation that my mental health issues steal from me to do most things, is the same motivation I would need to use to seek help, and it sucks. I don’t know how to explain it, but I’m tired as hell of people calling that fact an “excuse” for not getting help. Carrying on with the previous metaphor, imagine a quadriplegic telling you that they cannot get up the stairs to go to the doctors office because they can’t move. Obviously that is not an excuse when they say it, for the same reason it is not an excuse when people with mental health issues talk about what they can or cannot do. Mental health issues are as real as physical health issues so we need to treat them that way. For those with physical impairments, we make accommodations, like ramps for wheelchairs, and we even have in home services like home health to take care of people who really have no way of taking care of themselves. We need a similar attitude when it comes to mental health. When someone tells you that their mental health makes it hard for them to get help, don’t gaslighting them, instead help them by removing barriers in their way. I don’t really know what all that entails, and we need to study these things more, but I know a HUGE one for me is money. Even having to ask for help is a barrier that is hard for me. I know I would be so much more likely to get help if I knew things were paid for. This is why I am such an advocate for Medicare for all, I know it would benefit all people with mental health issues knowing that literally, all they had to do to get help would be to just walk in the doctors office, that’s it.

I know this may be something that is hard to understand as a Neurotypical person, but please, like you trust a quadriplegic when they tell you that they cannot move, trust me when I tell you that this is my experience. My mental health issues can be such a barrier for just functioning. I think that’s one reason I am so angry at job culture and the notion that if you don’t work then you somehow deserve a life of poverty. That sentiment is so ignorant to the concept of mental health that it simultaneously makes me sick to my stomach and makes my blood boil.

Look, I, and so many other people that society likes to deem lazy, do sincerely want to add something to this world and to be a force for good, but we have real health issues as real as a broken leg and we are struggling to deal with them as much as you are struggling to understand us. I promise you, making healthcare a right and removing anything that could remotely be considered a barrier between people and said healthcare, would be a tremendous step in helping people with diseases such as depression, anxiety, BPD, bipolar disorder, and so many more diseases of the mind that we yet to understand well enough to have a name for. Please, for the love of god, stop judging people who lack motivation, please believe us when we tell you how hard it is for us to just exist on a daily basis, please stop filling us with the fear of being homeless and instead make housing alongside of healthcare a guaranteed human right, and please… try to be as understanding of health issues you can’t see as you are of those you can.

When you tell us our problems aren’t real, or say anything as ignorant as “just move, it’s not that hard”… we tend to believe you, and in doing so we turn inward and hate ourselves, and quite honestly want to and in many cases do end up killing ourselves. It is hard enough for us to accept our illnesses for what they are without society telling us that they don’t exist, not that we’d know what living in a society that acknowledges mental health issues even feels like. I would like to know what that feels like, and I hope whoever is reading this moves a little closer to understanding how much our society is built in a way that does not acknowledge mental health at all. We need help, start by believing us.