Everyone Falters

I feel miserable. So maybe I can write now. I’ve been in a slump, a block, facing a brick wall. I was happy. Today I am bugging out. Not really, not entirely. It is just windy, cold, and rainy. My fingers hurt really bad. Perhaps I’ve been picking at my fingers since I haven’t been picking my brain for ideas. I always try and figure out why? I don’t think the why is that simple. 

I am tired of being told how to present myself to the world. Many people have offered up suggestions I haven’t asked for. Maybe what women need more than suggestions on how they should be is support for being who they are. I don’t like to talk about being crazy. I don’t feel crazy but I often feel persecuted. Not in a paranoid "everyone is out to get me" sort of way. Just in a, it is not acceptable to live my life and be who I am sort of way. It makes me disinclined to want to talk to many people. 

Writing is when I am trying to talk to the most people at once. Lately I’ve tightened my circle, kept all the vultures at bay. You can’t say a lot without hearing a lot of grief. You could always just ignore what I have to say as most people will. I really don’t know why we are so unforgiving of our own flaws when we all have them. 

We are sold images of unrealistic perfection and expected to live fulfilling lives trying to obtain them. We never can because they are not even real. No model in any magazine is unedited. Everyone on television is wearing make-up. Not just actors and actresses, news anchors, interviewees, everyone. Many women wear make up every single day. They never leave the house without it. They brush their teeth and do their hair and make-up before their husband or family awake. 

I called make-up my war paint when I was in high school. I wore it when I wanted a protective shield from the outside world, to keep from showing them my true colors. I’ve been upset about the state of what it means to be a woman, to be feminine in any way really. There is a war being waged against women and children. We have campaigns against bullying in school but we bombard our children with unrealistic expectations of themselves and their reality. 

We don’t teach them with what we say; we teach them with what we do. They see us judging our friends’ emotional struggles and appearances and they do the same. They see it on television. Their parents emulate that behavior and worship reality T.V. stars, so why wouldn't they? 

The television is not to be regulated the same as a toaster. The television controls the cultural consciousness. It is everything that we are, at the same time a projection telling us what we should be and a reflection of who we really are. 

I can never help myself but to imagine this world from another point in time, sometimes before and sometimes after. I imagine this world from another creatures’ perspective. What do we look like? How do we appear? That is the real question of appearance, not our individual flaws but how we organize as a society to help correct those flaws. 

Everyone falters, except sometimes those born of privilege. I tend to believe even most born of privilege falter, they just blame it on someone else, unlike how the lower classes are taught to always blame themselves. Everyone I know is suffering some form of illness or financial distress. Everyone I know. I fear even some of the ones who say everything is fine are suffering worst of all. 

I fear I project that onto people. I don’t want it to be my negativity that shapes the way of the world. I don’t think I have that sort of power. I know how I want things to be, but I can see how they are. I can see the world I believe is possible and won’t come for generations from now. 

It is hard to be here now. Everyone still childishly believing that violence can ever breed anything other than more violence. Whenever I want to talk about these things, media and how it shapes the world we live in, I am told I just want to argue. I don’t really like that word. I don’t really like to argue. 

I question things all the time, almost everything. I question everything other people say and do but also everything I say and do. Nothing is ever fully answered. At the same time there is no way to continue conversation without questions unless people are just shouting ideas at one another. 

I like joking too. Joking is underrated. Joking, not to hurt other people, can often create bridges of communication with even the most different people. Everyone has lost their sense of humor. Things are too stressful. God forbid a woman curse too just like a man, that’s not funny! "Why are you so angry?" It must be because I am such a militant feminist. 

I think people underestimate how much I use humor to deal with all the fucked up things I know about. I can be funny and enjoy life every single day and still know the reality of what most people, who are not me, are suffering through. People who act like knowing the reality of the world is too much for you or your children to handle fail to realize the privilege that is involved in not being one of those many people suffering. You should care, you should appreciate that only by pure luck of who you were born to, do you come across the privileges you do have. 

Most people fall somewhere on the scale. Some do worse than us and some do better. We should not be comparing lives. We should appreciate our lives and try to help others because that is what makes us feel good. 

Drugs and money also make us release intensely good brain chemicals. It would be better if we could learn how to feel good from loving one another and connecting instead of from chemical reactions from random stimuli. That is why we have so many “my strange addictions” that we have a reality show, problems with our mind that have manifested within our physical selves. 

There is a very popular fallacy in modern science right now. That the mind can be sick and the body can be sick and that the two are usually unrelated. But that isn’t true. Our sciences should not be separate. They are all separate languages to describe the same ideas. Like different religions, different branches of science believe their way is the right way to describe all that is. 

Science used to believe in superior races, eugenics was popular just 100 years ago which is not very long. We shouldn’t assume everything science says is true anymore than we should believe everything religion says is true. We should take in as much information while we are alive so we can and draw our own conclusions and contribute what we have discovered for everyone's benefit. But if we are to make progress first we have to stop judging each other for our failures and start supporting each others’ talents. 

You cannot learn anything if you are never wrong. You cannot succeed if you have never failed. The only way to never fail is to never try anything you are uncertain of. All of the things we do not know live outside the bounds of certainty.