120) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 9: Healing, and the Doctrine of Original Awesomeness
As far as I’m concerned, healing is dramatically NOT about self-improvement. It’s NOT the positivity movement. It’s not changing yourself, fixing yourself, or achieving anything, really. It’s not goals. It’s not a vision board. It’s not “believe until you achieve.” It’s just BEING, yourSelf. It’s learning/remembering to be who you already are. Who you were born as. Who you have always been.
119) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 8: Oops, I fucked up
Once we are the center of someone’s world, or at least are manipulated into believing that we are, we become like putty in their hands. And once they started being unhappy with us, finding faults, being displeased, criticizing, criticizing, criticizing, we’ll knot ourselves into a pretzel trying to make things right again.
118) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 7: Resistance, the sneaky bastard
Society’s general response to this, ubiquitously shared from the well-meaning friend to the well-meaning internet commenter, from the self-help speaker to the solutions-oriented therapist, is, in essence, just do it. Just change. Just stop thinking the bad thoughts and holding on to the negative beliefs. Just stop focusing on yourself and your problems and look at how you can be of service to others. Just stop feeling sorry for yourself for all the things that haven’t been perfect, and practice gratitude for all the blessings in your life. Not uncommonly nowadays, I hear echoes of Jordan Peterson, sternly telling Bucko to sort himself out.
117) Moral hypocrisy and the consequent impossibility of lasting international peace
Do we really believe, as a society, in a system of morality in which we get do precisely what we deny to others, because we are convinced of our moral superiority? Can “we” kill but “they” can’t, because we simply believe “we are Good, and they are Evil?”
And this will lead to lasting peace…how?
116) Dealing with the Devil: Adventures in parenting, Part 4 — Role-play, kids, and personal growth
One of the most basic, “meta” points that I know for sure sunk into my kids’ minds from their encounter with Asmodeus (and others that have occurred subsequently), is the fact that the best lies, the most devious propaganda, the most slippery, manipulative messages, are built out of the truth. The more truth that’s in the lie, the better it is. The absolute best un-truths will be built entirely out of truths, put together in such a way that, holistically, as “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, they take on a different kind of meaning.
115) Dealing with the Devil: Adventures in parenting, Part 3 — Philosophizing with Asmodeus
“What happens during war is terrible, Siskenet. Terrible, but necessary, until the Hierarchy establishes itself and stabilizes things.”
“The Hierarchy?” Siskenet scoffed. “You mean like, until you control everything, right? Like, things are ‘stable’, because everyone who was fighting against you is, what, dead?”
The man shook his head. “No Siskenet. Hierarchy should never be imposed. It should evolve naturally. It’s like they say, ‘the cream rises to the top.’ Right?”
114) Dealing with the Devil: Adventures in parenting, Part 2 - Asmodeus and Siskenet
Siskenet crossed his arms. “Fine. You want me to trust you? Let’s start with you showing me what you really look like. Nothing to hide, right?”
“No tea then?” The man sighed. “Very well. But there is nothing to show you, Siskenet. I have no true form.”
“But…how…. What do you mean? That doesn’t even make sense.” Siskenet set it firmly in his mind, he wasn’t going to be persuaded by whatever this Demon said. It was a Demon! They were in the Hells. He must not forget that, no matter how slick this creature’s whole schtick was.
“I’m an abstraction. A coalescence of patterns that very commonly replicate in consciousness, throughout the self-aware, sentient creatures of the worlds.” The man smiled, spreading his hands and shrugging. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”
113) Dealing with the Devil: Adventures in parenting, Part 1 - A Sentient Universe
So, the other day, my kids and I made a deal with Baphomet.
It was our second time making a deal with a Lord of Evil.
Hmmm, you may be getting the wrong impression here. Let me explain.
112) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 6: Backlash, resistance, and dissociation
In the example of procrastination, your wiser self (or maybe it’s your motivated, goal-striving self) knows that Doing The Thing is the right thing to do, and has convinced itself that it WANTS to do that thing. It will feel a sense of self-integrity, authenticity, if it follows through on its intentions.
But then there’s a bunch of other selves. And they say, “Fuck Doing The Thing; I want to Do a Different Thing.”
111) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 5: What Backlash can teach us about ourselves
But the inner emptiness eventually must be faced. We crash, through relationship failure, career burnout, addictions spiralling, etc. In one way or another, karma catches up with us.
110) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 4: Healing, when you hate yourself
In any case, you’re going to hate Backlash. And you’re going to feel like Backlash hates you too. No matter how many times you make excellent, rock-solid plans to “get better”, Backlash is, for sure, going to come along and screw them all up. That’s just what it does. Asking it not to is like asking a dog not to wag its tail or a cat not to act superior to the idiotic dog wagging its tail.
108) War, Part 4: Solutions?
It seems to me that war stops only when one of two conditions are met. Neither of these conditions are very likely, or easy. They are definitely easy to critique, easy to dismiss. But the alternative, as we discussed previously, is more war in a world, bristling with weapons, poised on the brink of global ecological collapse. So….yeah, we can have that, or we can figure out which of the following conditions we are most likely to be able to meet.
107) War, Part 3: The 21st Century
Can you imagine how you’d react if, in each of those stories, just as the Enemy is at the gate and the Heroes are gathering for their courageous final battle, the whole thing just….stops? The heroes decide at the last moment to just say fuck it and go do something else? Like, instead of battling for the Earth, let’s take our IronMan suit and Captain America shield and let’s go fuck something up, take over a country maybe, and make ourselves rich! MWAAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!
106) War, Part 2: Hate and Heroism
Most critically, what we give the Bad Guys, what’s more important than money and weapons, is followers. It’s obedience. Invariably, the Aggressors of history are aggressors because lots and lots and lots of people follow them.
So it’s not just Bad Guys that are “the problem”. It’s Followers.
105) War, Part 1: Love
“Hey Mommy, Daddy, Grandpa, Grandma…..What did you do during the Great War?”
Have you ever thought of how you will answer questions like that? Because your future will, if you are lucky, arrive, and you will have lived through whatever atrocities humankind inflicts on each other in the present days and coming years. And someday, someone you will care about very much is likely going to ask you that question. … Nobody wants to know, “deep down inside”, that when it really mattered, they failed.
104) Freedom Convoy "vs." the Police
Such a “convoy” of Indigenous people (or say, BlackLivesMatter supporters…), would never, ever, ever make it to Canada’s capital without any real policing occurring. They would never have selfies with friendly police officers who were proud to get recorded talking about how much they support “the movement”. They would NEVER be allowed to parade themselves into the city’s core, to harass local residents, to violate practically every by-law that exists without the police lifting a finger. And the rhetoric of the police would most certainly NOT be about how they don’t want to confront them or are unable to because of a lack of resources.
103) From Shitty-ness to Wellness: Part 3 - The Self-Improvement Treadmill and Its Perpetuation of Trauma
As you go through life and learn more about yourself, you may at some point decide to really take your well-being into your own hands, and DO SOMETHING about it. Some people succeed spectacularly in this quest, or at least it seems that way on Instagram. But no small number of us try, and try, and try, year after year, with our self-improvement goals and checklists and resolutions and vision boards and buddy systems and therapists and support groups and exercise programs and gurus and mindfulness leaders and spiritual books and self-help trends. And the next year, we’re still at it. Then the next decade.
102) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness: Part 2 - Stigmatization and the disempowerment of the struggling
When you find yourself struggling with mental illness, the “personal responsibility” mantra all-too-often reinforces the already-deeply-internalized sense that there is “something wrong with you”. Society’s stigmatization of those who struggle with mental health, coheres so seamlessly with that “inner critic” that it starts to seem accurate.
101) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness: Part 1 - Some Personal Thoughts on the Journey out of Hell
It doesn’t matter where you are or where you’ve been, in the sense that there is no value in judging yourself for that. It matters where you are heading, what direction you are pointing yourself in. If you’re pointing yourself towards wellness, honesty, healing, growth, then you deserve an inner standing ovation. Well done, hero-in-training! Well done.
100) A New Century
3:45 in the morning, January 1st, 2000.
(yawn, stretch, roll out of bed, go pee…)
Well, it’s the dawn of a new century! Actually, a new millennium! Well…I guess it isn’t really, until Jan 1st, 2001, but hey, nobody really cares about that. Anyway, whoa, that’s pretty cool. This sure feels like a unique, maybe even transformative, moment in history.
(sit down on the floor, lean against the couch, pack a bowl….)
(Blurble blurble blurble. Exhaaaaaale….)
Ahhhh….