mental independance

(This post was written March 1st 2023 but lost due to server problems then recovered thanks to way back machine.)

I don’t know what to do. I am so stressed out. I am trapped in a crevice with nowhere to go and I can’t endure the crevice any longer. I can’t talk about the crevice either because there is an upcoming trial in which I am a witness. I could write in my journal or talk to the nice shrink the government gave me but at the end of the day telling her my thoughts and feelings doesn’t change anything. I already know what I think and feel. I just don’t know what to do or how to endure. I don’t see any practical solutions. And I’m too anxious to pray cause when you are anxious and try to send out your thoughts they just spiral back down onto you. And to be real about it, it was my faith in God that got me into this trouble in the first place. So I don’t know what to do. If I stay in my current position, I will lose my mind. Imagine if every time you spoke the people around you started shrieking like chickens then swirled around in circles collapsing on the floor where they shook and screamed “Why did you do this to me? Why did you do this to me?” over and over. And you don’t know what you’ve done. How long can a person live like that and not go insane? I feel like I’m trapped in the Queen of Heart’s court in Wonderland. And I can’t even talk about it. Except vaguely like this.

No matter what I do I am always bad. There is always very complicated reasoning as to why I have done something wrong. So you just start recessing more and more. But no matter how recessed you become it doesn’t matter. Now your whispers count as screams and one wrong word makes you a murderer. So you try harder. You try different things. But every step you take is just one more crime you’re guilty of.

Somehow I ended up at a Wikipedia page about psychological manipulation and it had a list of traits that the recipients of manipulation generally share. It was like reading an exact description of my personality.

Naïveté or immaturity	People who find it too hard to accept the idea that some people are cunning, devious and ruthless or are “in denial” if they are being taken advantage of.^[17]
Over-agreeableness	People who are too willing to give another the benefit of the doubt and see their side of things.^[17]
Low self-esteem	People who struggle with self-doubting, lacking in confidence and assertiveness, and who are likely to go on the defensive too easily.^[17]
Over-intellectualization	People who try too hard to understand and believe others have some understandable reason to be manipulative.^[17]
Emotional dependency	People who have a submissive or dependent personality. The more emotionally dependent a person is, the more vulnerable they are to being exploited and manipulated.^[17]

I’ve always had the hardest time accepting that someone could truly be lying or acting in a devious manner. I don’t know why. And if I am close to people I tend to believe anything they say without question. Even if I know for an absolute fact that it is untrue, something in me still believes. I’ve always struggled to have confidence in my own perceptions, instead I let other’s words override them. I will bend my mind into a pretzel trying to make sense of what people say, no matter how self-contradictory or flying in the face of reality their words may be, and I have always been emotionally & physically dependent on others to a humiliating degree.

So I guess this is a chance for me to learn how to trust in my own perceptions. Do I believe the person who says I am hurting them when I’m pretty sure I’m not or who says I am screaming when I’m pretty sure my voice is room temperature? Objectively I know what is true, I just don’t know how to have faith in my own mind. My faith automatically goes to believing what I am told. Unless you have this problem yourself, I fear it won’t make much sense.

Another big problem is my need to be good, which is used like a cattle prod to control me and force me into situations of increasing powerlessness. If you assert yourself, you are bad. You can get screamed at, but if you scream back you are bad. You must treat other people’s emotions like Golden Kings to be worshiped while ignoring your own or you are bad. You must swallow the words you are fed no matter how little sense they make or you are bad. You must accept that you are bad or you are bad. You must accept that other people weren’t hurting you, you were hurting them, or you are bad. You must believe what you are told or you are bad. Because if you don’t accept the words that are thrown at you you will see those around you crumple on the floor shrieking “LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE!!!! LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE!!!” Now you can see how bad you are with your own eyes.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to hold my mind together. When it gets bad I can hardly sing, clean or function at all. I can rarely think or plan. The thing that helps is complete detachment. But once again, this triggers my issues with being”bad” because it is bad not to care. You are supposed to care about other people.

And I WANT to care. It’s just that it becomes the rope that is used to strangle me.

* I just realized that titling this help sounds bad, like I am playing the victim. Anyway, don’t worry I will think of something.

** I was just walking and panicking cause my arms have started to shake probably due to nerves because I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel…. it feels like the road leads off a cliff. And having the shakes is making it harder to perform basic tasks causing me to panic even more. Anyway, just when I was about to break down I saw this on the corner of a sidewalk.

It felt like a sign, because I see teddy bears as being one form that angels take. It’s like no matter how alone you feel there are always more beings watching and ready to help you than you could ever realize.

I see feminism as being the natural, inflammatory response of a society that needs to flush out an excess of fashion designers.

Officially, feminism is about wage discrepancies and political power, yet it only seems to arise in places where women are made to feel neurotic about their physical appearance. Eventually, they reach a fork in the road where they either have to become a feminist or have that extra rib removed. By nature, women are designed to be sensitive towards what men think and feel about them. It hurts to feel that you aren’t perfectly beautiful and lovable the way god made you. And- even if you are a celebrated beauty- it hurts to feel beautiful only because you match certain objective standards that could be met by anyone. It makes you interchangeable, a commodity. I think people become feminists from the perception that men are shallow and incapable of true love, therefore it is dangerous to risk being dependent on them.

Here in West Virginia, there is really no feminism to speak of, but no need for it either. Thin or fat, old or young, neatly dressed or wild looking, the women seem unselfconscious about their appearance. They are confident that simply being alive and female will suffice to attract men to them. Judging by the number of children they have, it seems they are right. It is strange, but, while living here I have yet to hear a single man or woman praise or critique anyone’s appearance, including their own.

Of course this may stem from the fact that hillbillies devote less of their brain to imagining how other people see them in general, probably a necessary trait for thriving in secluded areas where admirers and applause are hard to come by. From what I can tell, they derive less pleasure from making a good impression, and less pain from making a bad one. Hence, the classic Appalachian front yard, filled with sofas, rusted pieces of metal, and semi-broken toys. Once I asked a neighbor about her landscaping style. She explained that storing junk in your front yard creates more space inside your house, and keeps the backyard free for games and picnics.

Putting your worst foot forward also creates a sort of protective psychological coating, similar to the No Tresspassing signs that adorn every property. It tells people upfront that you aren’t going to bend yourself out of shape to put on the ritz for them, and if they want a cup of sugar they should go elsewhere. Which is an important vibe to put off. Living in the same mountain crevice can get rather intimate and you really need to have a bit of a barbed wire feeling about you or your neighbors will be cleaning out your fridge before you know it.

But anyway, back to feminism….

The myth of sexism, I think, is that it flourishes among backwoods country people and square religious Midwesterners. My observations, however, have led me to believe the opposite, that sexism- like many contagious diseases- begins in the largest, most cosmopolitan cities who then export it through movies, music, and fashion to the rest of the country.

Of course, this depends on your definition of sexism. To some, sexism is defined by the genders having complementary roles rather than identical ones. To me, it is a mental disease that causes women to have low self-esteem which they then attempt to fortify through male approval. Sometimes they do this through excessive focus on their physical appearance, and sometimes through trying to adopt masculine traits that they don’t actually possess. The classic movie heroine, gunning people down in a leather bikini, would be doing both. In a non-sexist society, females can be pudgy and have no greater ambition in life than to create an “Under the Sea” theme for their child’s birthday party. And their husbands can feel very, very proud of them for doing this.

James is very proud of me for making this picture.

Of course, the urban worldview causes psychological stress to men as well. They may no longer feel that being a good husband and providing for their family is enough, but instead feel pressure to worm their way towards the top of the human pyramid. These pressures may also exist in the country, but they are not as strong. It is much less exhilarating to sit atop a tiny pyramid and much less painful to live at its bottom.

Which is why I don’t see sexism as being a problem, in and of itself, in our society. It is just one of the many inevitable side effects that occur when a whole cluster of people try to source their self-esteem from being better than each other. We could start a social movement to make all sexist sentiments go away, but since they would probably be replaced by ideas just as offensive, why bother?

On the other hand, while I don’t recommend trying to wipe it from the planet altogether, I do think there are two little steps we can take to diminish the power of sexism in our own spheres and thus render feminism unnecessary.

1) I think a number of “mental diseases” could be cured just by people expressing themselves more honestly and more frequently. One thing I have noticed with men especially, is that it tends to be the most obnoxious and also the most sexist of them (Donald Trump) who are always running their mouths, while the “better” men tend to remain quiet. This sometimes gives the impression that Trump’s thoughts are representative of men in general. As Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

2) On a personal level, we should relish the poisonous ideas of our group mind to the extent that they spur us on towards greater mental independence. After kicking their babies out of the nest, eagles remove the soft filling to reveal a bed of thorns. When the little birds try to fly back to mommy and daddy, their bodies get cut up and bloodied. Likewise, our group mind is filled with ideas that tend to cut into our self-esteem, and the older you get, the less they seem to flatter you. Perhaps this is by design. These thorns push us, once we are ready, away from the mucoid comfort of conformity, and out into the big blue world to perceive and believe what no one else has before.