Greenstorm's Journal

So my dad is crazy. I don't have a ton of interest in trying to diagnose him, but his behaviour is well outside anything even near normal in a society. He hasn't really held a job. He has initiated and attempted to initiate a lot of very weird lawsuits. He writes relationship-revenge books and self-publishes them. He didn't mow his lawn for 24 years so now the mouldering house inside is invisible. He knows how things should be done. He's That Guy running in local politics. Etc.

Two of my three brothers are crazy. They have been institutionalized in various ways, they're on psychiatric meds, etc. They've experienced psychosis, breaks with reality, etc.

My third brother isn't crazy.

He didn't live with dad when the other ones did. He had a pretty reasonable but sorta bouncy career trajectory. He hasn't had mental health Incidents, maybe a bit of depression like everyone. He works in trades, he's starting to supervise now. He's married. And.

He's been talking lately about how the news media is a vast conspiracy, I think in connection to wanting to vote for a far-right party in support of free speech.

He dropped it into a family chat and I'm having trouble even reading it because I'm terrified. This is the freeze response. It's an enormous trigger response, I literally do not know what is actually happening. We'd, I mean. If I was close with anyone of us it was him.

Please don't let this happen.

Please don't let him turn into my dad (though to be fair my dad supported the same political party I'm planning to vote for federally, so. But I'm just afraid. My body is afraid. I'm afraid of who dad was. I'm afraid of how much contempt he had for everyone who didn't serve him).

What I should do is listen and clearly state what I think: there are lots of frames in the world, there is always room for interpretation, and folks will always be interpreting in ways that they need to for various reasons. It's your job to parse all that and do your own interpretation. It's your job to be knowledgeable in the things you care about. And people having other frames, or multiple frames existing, doesn't mean there's a conspiracy or that things need to be squashed. It just means that there are people.

Mom is handling it cautiously and with real grace and integrity.

Everyone in the world is people, my brother. They're not objects set to willfully obstruct you. They're people. Inside they are just. Like. You. Don't go down dad's road.

Failure is rarely an option for me nowadays. I've lived a bunch of my life gently, allowing myself weakness when I have it, sometimes perhaps over-indulging in things like calling in sick to have sex or backing out of interpersonal confrontations.

I still try to live the relationship side of my life gently now that I've learned how, spending time with people who are good for my soul.

At the same time I have a rigorous schedule that leaves no leeway for my humanity.

For instance, I've been working and going to school both near full-time and keeping the rats and two boyfriends and something of a social life on the go. That translates to between 20 and 30 classroom hours per week, 12-15 hours of commuting per week, 30-ish to 35 hours of work per week, plus one day per week rat cage cleaning and whatever the people stuff adds up to, plus of course all the cleaning stuff.

I keep myself going in a number of ways. Some are gentle: I put something shiny in the next week or so, and I work hard to get through the week to it; I support myself and encourage myself and tell myself that I'm awesome and accomplish a lot; I pay attention to beautiful things around me and let them inform me of my right and fitting place in the struggles of this world. Often this is all it takes.

Some ways I get through are less gentle: I tell myself how badly people will be let down if I don't do something; I give myself a little time to break down and then remind myself that no one's interested in interacting with me if I cry and whine all the time; mostly I just keep working, through the dark part, through irritation to mental fury, through my brain spitting bile and insults at every contact, through fantasies of great pain or bodily harm to myself or people around me, through everything my mind can send at me I just go from task to task to task. I get things done and let my mind gibber.

There's sometimes a price for being harsh on myself. I begin to lose faith in the givingness of the world. I begin to forget what happiness tastes like and why I would desire any sort of human connection. Finally, pushed too far, my mind short-circuits and leaves me suspended and hanging in an abyss of static, snarling at any intrusion of consciousness.

Things fix this. Time to myself abates it; time with people I love, touching and being touched, talking and being talked to, draws me back into the wonderful parts of the world and gives me reasons for continuing on this path. I can recover quickly, especially if I haven't pushed too far, but I do need time to recover.

This month it feels like I don't have time to recover. I think I have a total of three or maybe 4 days that don't contain work, school, or most often a combination of both. Many of these are 14-hour days. There just isn't enough space.

I'm coming to my computer as a blank screen, to livejournal as a space that doesn't talk back. My own voice will heal me, I hope, that first increment so I can reach out to people for a little more contact. It seems to be working; allowing these feelings and these words to be of value, even if only to myself, is pushing me erratically from blankness through furious anger and towards tears.

It's a funny balance there, actually, seesawing between anger and compassion at myself for this barren painful feeling. It wobbles back and forth from one second to the next. I let it happen, no sense wishing it was some other thing.

That's enough writing for now, I suppose.

So I don't normally pay a ton of attention to "the news". One might even say I keep my head deliberately in the sand sometimes.

Sometimes, though, ya just can't keep your chin down far enough. WHAT THE FUCK is with the world lately? Is this just environmentalism going big-time and trendy? I understand that things get dumbed down when they hit mass consumption stage, but things seem to be getting so dumbed down they're actually moving backwards. It's creating this bizarre anti-environmentalism, where people are if you will excuse my caps SO FUCKING SURE THEY ARE HELPING and instead they are ACTIVELY HELPING TO FUCK THINGS UP MORE THAN IF THEY HAD JUST DONE NOTHING.

I mean, what the fuck? How does this even exist in the world? Who ARE these corn-as-biofuel, cutting-down-standing-wood-and-burning-it-will-make-our-forests-carbon-sinks-again, jet-organic-food-from-Chile fucknuts? Is it just the labyrinthine twistings of science-bureaucrazy-media-indifference-rinse-repeat that create this? Because this SO DAMN STUPID that I don't know how it could be created by accident, and SO DAMN IGNORANT that maybe ten minutes of research and common sense applied to the issues should explode them into little bits. Instead the media 'science/random factoid' soundbites get repeated, the issue gets popularised, the policy gets implemented, and no one stops to think: Hey! Corn is food and inefficient as a convertor of sunlight to biofuel, let's use an efficient convertor like sugarcane or grow something on land unfit for agriculture if we want to simply convert rather than reduce! Not only will logging the pine beetle forests and burning the wood for biofuel result in the same amount of carbon in th eair, but it will fuck with the regenerating ecosystem and release all the carbon sequestered in the rest of the vegetation and destabilise slopes and reduce their ability to uptake moisture resulting in floods, washouts, and dead streams! Maybe Chile's organic standards are even weirder and less useful than our own and jetting food that distance is somewhat counterproductive to helping the environment which buying organic is supposed to accomplish anyhow!

And I mean, SUV use is still going up instead of down. There are hundreds of acres of unused arable land in our cities, even if we don't go into balconies and rooftops as per Havana's model. People still drive if they're going four blocks or if it's a sunny day when being out on a bike is sheer joy, and then drive to the gym to work out on machines that require electricity after work. It's not like there aren't things that are self-evident like that lying around by the bucketful. And it's not like there are't useful things happening, like http://sharingbackyards.com/ or community supported agriculture or the hundred-mile-diet thing which is driving the formation of local expertise.

I'm reduced to foaming at the mouth and breathing really hard nowadays. Time to use this energy for packing. Gotta be done by tonight. But guys, please... I don't know. Put an hour a month into researching environmental issues? Anyone who reads this is likely to be doing some practical useful things already, but the more real, true info in people's heads out there the better this will go. And plant a planterbox of lettuce seeds and do the three-week magic of growing your own Earthbound Organics box and you'll have done a LOT.

Ne well, guys.