mental health

Keep Your Secrets.

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Some people I trusted lied to me recently, knowing full well that I would find out within a matter of days. I, of course, found out earlier because of the relationships I have built over time, and so it came back to me almost immediately that I had been lied to.

Clearly, I’m not going to trust those two people as much again, but I suspected them not telling me the truth because of their behavior. The confirmation only proves what I suspected: They are poor liars.

It wasn’t about something important enough to make a difference, but two things bothered me about it: First, they knew I would end up finding out and were dishonest anyway, and second, that they would risk a relationship built over years to be dishonest to me.

There are reasons people lie even over inconsequential things, and research has shown the most common reasons people lie, but it’s easy to go into the weeds with that and lose one’s bearings. It’s best to stick to the simpler aspects until more complex aspects present themselves – Occam’s razor.

Clearly I had valued the relationship more than they did, which is often the issue when it comes to forms of betrayal. If you value a relationship highly and the other values the relationship less than you expect, ‘betrayal’ is often what we feel. This is an important thing to know since I may have positional authority over them soon, particularly since as I have come to understand that they may have been instructed to lie by someone who will be an equal in the near future, which also tells me that the equal doesn’t see themselves as equal. They see themselves as above, and that does not bode well for any sort of relationship. Or maybe it’s just insecurity.

I tend to live my life openly and transparently. I value authenticity of people and provide the same. If I can’t say something because it might betray a trust, I say that or avoid being put in a position where I would have to say that. The people I try to surround myself with respect those sorts of boundaries, because if I invoke it for someone else, I will invoke it for them. Because of this, I have a small circle of people I call friends where the level of trust is high, and this could be because of my own attachment disorder as well; I understand I have one and have pushed back against it for some time. It’s hard to tell where it begins or ends. How one feels about a person isn’t always about the person.

This is pretty important to be able to work through. It seems like a life skill that we should pay more attention to, particularly in an age where people are having their text generated by algorithms trained on the output of what could be the most dishonest and delusional species on the planet.

In that regard and a few others, I am thankful for the dishonesty – it tells me who is not trustworthy over little things, and when they are not trustworthy over the little things, the big things are always suspect – for they are made of the little things.

The Social Spiral.

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Yesterday, I wrote a bit about echo chambers, social networks and ant mills. I had a conversation with ChatGPT about it – if you can call it a conversation – and it told me that the equivalent of ant mills couldn’t exist in human society because humans think critically.

That seems like a hallucination. So I asked it if human critical thinking was in decline, and it gave me a list of pros and cons and did not take a side. It basically said, “You figure it out, moron, if you’re a critical thinker you should be fine.”

There seems to be an implicit assumption by large language models that we humans are smarter than we are in practice. I’m not going to say that humans are stupid, but I will say that humans do stupid things all the time and that what we call intelligence is pretty self-referential and easily gamed for the good of some.

The point, I suppose, is that ChatGPT communicates as high an opinion of humanity as humanity likes. That seems dangerous, but I’m ok with it handing out participation trophies to everyone because… well, because after some sleep, it became apparent to me that we’re all actually in the equivalent of an ant mill, except it incorporates elements of musical chairs.

Regardless of where we are on the planet these days, we are born into some culture and within some geopolitical line drawn sometime in the past, usually more than 100 years ago where 100 years is roughly 4 generations of humans. A lot changes in 100 years.

Within those geopolitical borders, there are these patterns as we grow as individuals. Education, work, procreation, death. Born into systems made generations ago in what hopefully made sense then, the systems don’t get updated too often and historians call them revolutions. Agricultural revolution. Industrial Revolution. People work less physically hard, but productivity is expected and productivity is pretty hard to define because it’s subjective. In this day and age, ‘productivity’ is almost always defined by someone else or something else.

And so we spiral around following each other, just going through the motions expected of us because to dare to think of another way would lead us from the spiral, away from where everyone else is.

People generally don’t like the spiral, so they gravitate to people they believe know a way out of the spiral and follow them, which explains why Donald Trump and Elon Musk have followers. These cults of personality persevere because the spiral sucks and, as oddball as they are, they are followed by those who hate the spirals enough that they are willing to put their own critical thought on hold because, really, the system sucks for a lot of people.

In the United States, who best represents the system? Presently, traditional Republicans and Democrats. Generations have seen what they have to offer, and that offer is at best shitty for most people, so when Trump comes along and shakes things up, the chance to get out of the spiral – however untrue – is attractive.

It seems like we’re seeing this a lot around the world. People don’t want to grind away in circles, but even the cults of personality that seem so attractive to some are just different spirals. All that needs to happen, really, is people stop following each other around and using their own critical thought – at least according to a generative artificial intelligence that thinks highly of we humans because we told it that it should.

We aren’t lost. We know exactly where we are because we’ve seen it all before on the last revolution, and it’s going to take more than funky hairstyles, speaking styles, and gravitas to get beyond it. It’s going to require substance, and just like the ant mill, all we have to do is be willing to blaze a new trail.

Now go off and think critically to help us get out of this spiral.

A Note To GenZ About Social Media And More.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

I was reading ‘Social Media Companies Are Having a Bad Moment‘, something written by Nick H. Penniman, who I assume is a GenZ based on the call to action, and I smiled a bit. I can never keep the generations below GenX in any form of structure, which is a failing of mine – these are generations that simply came after mine.

I suppose I could dedicate the time to keep track of which generation is doing what, but I think that’s not time well spent for me. After all, I am of GenX, a Third Culture Kid and a latchkey kid, and I was raised by Kermit The Frog.

I’m gonna let everyone in on a secret: The screens aren’t the problem, social media isn’t the problem, the message is. We can go back and forth about the medium being the message, but it’s a bit simpler than that. This is not to dismiss the concerns expressed in the article but to instead to underline the actual issue.

Every advance in communication technology was disruptive because it changed the way we did things. There was a time when reading a newspaper around others was considered anti-social. Before that were other things, like the printing press and literacy removing power from the literate. These things humanity survived.

What is different now is that during all those communication upheavals, messages got more and more sticky because everyone was trying to sell everyone else their shit. Some of it was good shit. Some of it was bad shit. In fact, there was a time when you could tell how bad a product was by how sticky the marketing was – when I grew up, if I ever did, a good product sold itself. A bad product required a lot more marketing.

Being raised by televisions, I saw a lot of advertisements targeted at me for toys that were shitty. I saved up my allowance and bought some pretty shitty toys and figured out pretty early that all that glitters is not gold. This doesn’t mean I didn’t buy crappy products in my lifetime, but at least I knew the risk.

Where things went off the tracks is Web 2.0 – the focus on marketing. Everybody got on the Internet and started selling good shit and bad shit, but the common denominator was that it was shit. If you look at the companies that survived the DotCom boom, you’ll see that those companies didn’t sell shit. They added value – some of it short-lived, some of it longer lived.

You have to be able to figure out what the shit and the value is. That’s why I wrote about the Red Dots of Life, because everyone wants to twist your ear and fill your eyeballs with their product as much as they can. If they could beam that directly into your head while you were sleeping, they would, because it’s about them. It’s not about you at all.

That’s the trick with social media. It’s about the signal to noise ratio, and the first step in that is deciding what is signal and what is noise. There’s trial and error involved. There’s a need for guidance for the younger generations who are impressionable so that they can tell the difference – and the truth is that even those of my generation and before are susceptible to all of this. In fact, politicians use it to great effect.

When you get on social media, there should be a purpose. In the days of Sesame Street’s first decade, the intent of Sesame Street was simple: Teach kids. Guide kids. And it was done by trustworthy people – to this day, nobody talks about the secret lives of Mr. Rogers and Jim Henson, and all that worked with them. Their intent was clear. They wanted to give us sticky things to help us deal with the world and, more importantly, each other. They showed up once a day and did just that for us, and we had the time to interact with our peers and elders to practice what we were taught – and my generation, the ‘Seen but not heard’ generation, didn’t do too bad despite all the problems we faced.

We did face problems, they seemed insurmountable, but somehow we survived and even thrived enough to scatter our genetics to the next generations. Like every generation before, we screwed you guys up a little. It’s what we do. We’re imperfect as a species, particularly when you get large groups of us together.

But now it’s much more dangerous. Social networks collect so much data about people that the social network companies know more about people than they themselves do – and it’s used for marketing because – guess what – they want to sell you shit. Some of it might be good shit, some of it might be bad shit. The trick is to find where the value is, and that has become more and more difficult.

When you’re young, time is cheap. As you grow older and claim more responsibility, time becomes much more expensive. It’s a part of the generation gap.

If, as individuals, we gravitate to value instead of shit, we can create a valuable world instead of a shitty one. Oh, and ease off those social networks mining your habits. There’s plenty of social media that is decentralized where you can find information, and while the social networks allow connection with others, they do not replace actual connection with others. Time away from the screens is good, but cutting them off entirely is not a good plan.

You are competing with people of your own generation to eek out a living. Those of you that win should be the ones who find value and create value, not sell shit. That’s what every generation seems to consistently get wrong.

As you’ll find, the most dangerous people of generations that came before you – dangerous to you – are the ones that are just selling shit instead of creating value.

It’s harder and harder to tell which is which, but the future of the species depends on every generation getting a decent value-to-shit ratio.

Can I tell younger generations what should be of value to them? Nope. I have some ideas, things related to being able to be do things for yourselves and invest in yourselves rather than just spending money. An hour exploring the thoughts and philosophies of others in classic books isn’t a bad place to start. Finding out why things work or don’t work is always a good thing to do.

But if you find yourself just mindlessly being entertained, that’s a symptom of a larger disease.

When your kids come around, GenZ, it’s gonna be worse. AI is already more persuasive than humans because it learned from our time tested and evolved persuasive communicators.

Triage

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

I had some land down in the South of Trinidad that, for a while, was a big part of my life. It caused me to stretch myself in new ways, and it almost always spread me thin with dealing with people nearby because some of those people were intent on expanding their own horizons with my land.

The fact is that they already had, for I had come by it through inheritance – an inheritance, strangely, that I did not want. My father was focused on the people in very adversarial ways, which wasn’t my style – people know this now, but they did not know that then. So, whenever I was around, there was some distrust, but I minded my business, dealt with people honestly even when they didn’t deal with me honestly, and accepted that they were smarter than me so that they would teach me. That worked out well, but it was a strain. Every time someone spoke with me, they seemed to want something, or were angling at something, or were trying to get me on their side against someone else.

That was tiresome.

To make matters worse, family members that had land adjoining were more focused on being adversarial with people down in that area which gave me even more headaches. People would come to me for advice once they got to know me – who to talk to, etc, and I guided them as best I could knowing full well that the people they would be dealing with wouldn’t understand them and wouldn’t want to. I would not say that I understood them myself, but I did understand that I didn’t understand them that well and that it was important to do so. People, after all, are pretty much the same everywhere I had found in my travels.

People need food, shelter, and a place to raise their children safely – and maybe leave something behind for their children.

All of that was troublesome to me. I had gotten good at dealing with people, but my true joy was going out beyond where civilization was on my land, just me, my 4×4, and the ground beneath my feet. I would escape there, sometimes moving things around, sometimes planting things, sometimes just sitting on the tailgate with my feet dangling. It was quiet. It was peaceful. It was something I could work with.

I made my own trails, then with license from family members to simply tell them what I saw if I saw encroachment, and with that I drove over much land, making paths where maybe there were paths before but overgrown. The people who saw me out there from a distance thought highly of my vehicles, which I did maintain well, but they didn’t realize it wasn’t the vehicles but the driver. The price for getting stuck was a shovel or a long walk to someone with a tractor – a price which I avoided all but 3 times in a decade.

When I got tired of people, I would just drop the pickup in range and go off into the bush. If I got really dirty, I’d go bathe in one of the ponds. People would comment that I came out of the bush cleaner than when I went in, and there were those that did not wish me well that wanted to follow me but could not. I was unpredictable, and those that had vehicles that were 4×4 did not follow my trails, because I pushed the vehicle to do things that they didn’t.

In the later years, after the government ran a highway through the land and screwed up the drainage, I continued this course but found that the highway had screwed up the drainage and parts of the land had become impassable. I would drive to those boundaries, where almost no one could follow, and sit there on the tailgate, looking around and accepting the truth of the matter.

I was there too late. There was much I could have done had I had the land a decade sooner, or two decades sooner. These were not things of industry and commerce, really, but simply making the place nicer. I hadn’t even been told about the land until the turn of the millennium, though it was owned by the family since 1973. Well, at least mortgaged. No one thought to tell me.

It wasn’t something I was angry or sad about. The realization that I could not do the things I wanted to because I was there too late was not something new. In the emergency room, we saw people too late. In the workshop, we saw equipment too late. So many things I saw too late, so many things that had I just been there a little sooner I could have done more.

Sometimes, things are just too late – and we move on. If we don’t, and we linger on what was already too late, we’ll likely be too late for something else. It’s triage. You do what you can and you move on.

Making Things Worse.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

She was angry.

She told me why she was angry, and I of course listened. It doesn’t really matter what she was angry about. It was just important that someone listened. In listening, I found that she was angry with the wrong people.

This is more common than you think. People often get angry at the wrong people because they don’t understand the situation, or because being angry with the right people leads to confrontation and most people don’t like confrontation.

Most people like to watch confrontation, particularly for ‘right reasons‘ which have to align with their own perspectives.

The trouble was, being angry for weeks had not resolved her situation. In fact, it actively made it worse, blaming the wrong people for the situation and refusing to talk to them. I arched an eyebrow most of the time, listened, and tried to point her at paths that would lead to resolution so she wouldn’t be angry.

After all, nobody really wants to be around someone who is angry, particularly about the same thing over periods of time, particularly when it’s apparent that their anger is only causing a spiral of more anger because the situation is not getting resolved.

It’s at this point that men get blamed for trying to fix something, it seems, in the broad brushes of pseudo-psychoanalysis on social media. No one ever seems to consider the fact that maybe not resolving a problem and just listening enables the problem further. But, because of rampant pseudo-psychoanalysis, because no one wants to be accused of not listening, I listened even when I knew the problem was being compounded by not focusing on being angry with the appropriate people.

Honestly, though, in this particular situation, being angry at the right people wouldn’t help that much, but being angry at the wrong people was extremely counterproductive because those same wrong people could help if they weren’t getting pissed off themselves by being treated poorly, or worse.

At some point, you finally tell the person that they’re angry at the wrong people.

So you join those wrong people.

And so I did, and so I did. It was predictable, the entire thing, but I had gone through the motions in the hope that somehow I could get past that wall of anger and point her in the right direction. I don’t know why I did that. It’s pretty high risk and no reward, really.

It used to surprise me how people so often get angry with the wrong things, the wrong systems, the wrong anything, really. My thought is that anger should be directed where it can make a difference, not shouted into a void or at immovable objects. Anger is a powerful tool, used properly, to make situations better when all other tools have failed.

All too often, anger is self-defeating because the anger is reinforced when anger isn’t focused the right way.

She’s still angry, I’m sure. I’m not. My situation hasn’t changed, which is fine because I’m not upset about my situation. Her situation, it’s apparent, is just getting worse.

What strange creatures we humans are. When we do this as individuals, it’s bad, but collectively ‘smart mobs’ do it all the time because sometimes smart mobs apparen’t ain’t smart enough.

Common Goals.

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Please do not use this image as an idea for a television series in my life time.

I’ve been watching the early seasons of the ER television series recently, and watching the actors work at pretending to be in the emergency room around the bed brought back some memories. What I noticed, though, and what I remember most are the dance.

No, not a cheesy dance in a cheesy musical about cheesy things – something that almost sounds like it’s trying to attract a certain Disney mouse. No, what I mean is the way in certain situations, everyone works together just right for a common outcome. The patient.

When patient’s lives are on the line there’s a bunch of trained professionals that do everything that they can to save a life. The untrained eye may see absolute mayhem, but it’s controlled chaos, it’s a pattern that evolves as the patient’s needs evolve. There are lots of things that happen to stabilize that person, they happen in order and priority, and if you’re not a part of that dance around the bed – gurney, really – you’re in the way.

It doesn’t always work out. There are losses. Yet if you’ve ever been in that dance, you know that there’s a loss of the self as the team works on something, and the leader of the whole thing is not anyone around the gurney. The real leader of the dance is the health of the patient, and everyone around them tries to meet those needs.

It doesn’t just happen in medicine. It happens everywhere when people have a common goal and a focus that isn’t themselves. I’ve seen and been part of it when it comes to production lines in industrial compounds, I’ve seen it during disasters, in software projects, and even in families. Everyone pitches in and gets things done to assure a ‘good outcome’, or at least minimize a bad one. I’ve seen it on the Internet a few times, but not as much. Open Source started off that way, and to a degree it still is so.

I don’t see it as often as I used to since social media began. Maybe it’s because you always have some “influencer’s” face stuck on the screen. Maybe it’s because everyone is trying to impress everyone else. Maybe it’s because values have shifted. Or maybe it’s just me and what I get stuck looking at.

It seems to me though that people are divided and when they are, they don’t find the common things to work on. It also seems to me that people who do want to change things feel powerless because they are, and to find people with common goals seems an insurmountable task by itself. People don’t believe that they can have an effect as they hop in their cars during the week to sit in traffic to get to an office or worksite to do something that someone else wants them to do so that they can pay bills for a home that they barely see.

I don’t know. I just know it seems to me like people aren’t working together as much on common goals, instead fighting artificial conflicts for others.

Or maybe it’s always been this way.

Somewhere To Belong.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

I was going through some memories on Facebook this morning and came across something I’d written 2 years ago:

“Sometimes, when looking back, you’ll see that nothing ‘went wrong’ but [as much as] sometimes it just wasn’t right to begin with.

As you grow older, ‘sometimes’ increases significantly.”

I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote that. It could have been anything in my past, a past of places, times, and different versions of me.

At the time, too, I was listening to Linkin Park’s “Somewhere to Belong”.

“Somewhere To Belong”, Linkin Park, with lyrics.

It doesn’t always occur to us, we who search for a place to belong, that maybe we aren’t meant to belong, that we are supposed to be in motion, and the yearning to belong gives us itchy feet.

This could explain how humans all wandered off from South Africa – if people felt like they belonged, they would not have left. Maybe there wasn’t enough food. Maybe there weren’t enough women. Maybe someone’s intelligence or lack thereof didn’t allow them to fit in. Maybe they were just jerks.

When I did a google search on “feelings of not belonging”, you find things on mental health – actually, some pretty good stuff that could be possible for an individual. I liked this response to ‘a feeling of not belonging’ here, and there are enough legitimate answers that if you really feel like you don’t belong, you should talk to a psychologist. I did, though not about that particular thing – but I addressed it and it’s not that I am off my rocker.

Sometimes you just don’t belong where you are, literally or figuratively.

We come from thousands of years of change, perhaps even billions of years depending on your perspective, but we only see a lifetime’s worth, a very small fraction of who we are. We are inherently wanderers, this stacking of people on top of each other is pretty new to humanity. Most religious texts have people wandering around somewhere, maybe even all of them.

Some people do not want to wander, they want to stay where they are. I used to think they were the crazy ones. In some ways, I still do, those who are happy with routine and the same ideas and thoughts comforting them like a blanket, but we are told these days that that is normal.

Part of me wants to say that society has normalized this, and maybe that’s true to an indeterminate degree, but if that were true then every city would be filled with crazy people. Some think that’s the case, but I elect to believe that statistically, cities show the significance of wanting to stay in one place in an undeniable way.

Both can be completely normal.

I’ve always had itchy feet myself, always wanting to explore a place or an idea, and part of that could be associated with my childhood, but really, it’s just who I am. I don’t want to see the same things, hear the same things, smell the same things over and over and over. I don’t fit in with people who do not have that feeling, and I shouldn’t – they are happy as they are. They are not curious. They are not explorers. They are settlers, and that’s an important aspect of being human.

Wanderers, though, seem also to be natural. While feelings of alienation or not belonging can be symptoms of legitimate mental health concerns, sometimes it’s natural. I love the feel of motion, I love the wind through my hair. I love learning new things.

For me, it’s when I can’t experience something new that I feel trapped. That paralysis and being imprisoned can also feel like much the same thing, but they are not the same. The former is done to one’s self, the other by others. The hint here is that there’s only one person you can control. Yourself.

The trouble is how we frame ourselves and are framed by others in these disagreements we call life.

Looking for somewhere to belong can just be an excuse to do something different. Go somewhere different. Experience something different.

And yeah, it is worth checking with a mental health practitioner. Probably the easiest medical people to deal with.

The Theory of Sanity.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

The world has often had me interrogate my own sanity, and with what I could find in the relatively new age of the Internet as well as a lot of reading, I believed I was sane. Self-diagnosis, however, is a bit of magical thinking particularly in this regard. If you’re not sane, you’re likely to believe you’re sane.

And of course we lie to ourselves. Sometimes these might even be good lies, where we push ourselves that much further than we thought, and sometimes they are bad lies, the ones that perpetually continue something that is self-destructive. Addiction is a good example of a ‘bad lie’.

I write all of this because my psychologist and I parted ways a few days ago, having met the goals originally set out. She told me I was sane, and that I seemed to be clear of any genetic predispositions I was concerned about. Of course, she didn’t say I was sane unprompted. I always joked about my sanity with her because, as above, the world makes you feel insane.

This is because the ‘civilized world’ is insane by itself, made up of a collection of seemingly sane decisions at varying levels that when looked at holistically… or, in the case of we lowly individuals, practically… make little to no sense at all, and these same things are repeated creating a pattern and that pattern demonstrates insanity by it’s recursiveness. I could add the Einstein quote cliche, but…

I feel like a fair amount of my life has been broadcast to me from whoever had the remote. It’s a strange metaphor because we never think that it’s probable that the people who have the remote are also the ones broadcasting only because our magical thinking makes us think it’s impossible.

Disney doesn’t encourage you to watch competing channels, do they? Do any channels do that? No, of course not. That’s why we need to turn off all that broadcasting that we’re on the receiving end of because there’s ‘nothing better to watch’.

We settle, and as we settle, standards drop, and as standards hit the ground like dead bodies in a video game, we wonder why people are accepting things as they are. Even as they were before they got to how they are. Often, the remedies are that of the addict: Short term solutions to long term problems.

I’ve stepped back from it increasingly over the years watching from further and further afar, not unlike the prisoner who finds freedom in prison and begins smiling and whistling while everyone’s grumpy. If you ask me a good question, I’ll give the honest answer which is not usually the polite answer, and can be so sarcastic that it impacts the gravitational field in the area. People have dropped things. Really.

There were so many times I interrogated myself before pushing forward on something that everyone else thought couldn’t work. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but whether it works or not while I’m off trying to spin the planet in the direction I’m choosing it will spin me right back in interesting ways. People talk about ‘getting caught up in a wave’, but I think that’s just a symptom of the friction that gives us that spin.

The world, as we experience it, is about how we live it, what we experience, and how that experience shades what we experience in the future.

The counseling gave me some new lenses to look at myself through. It will remain useful. I have no problem talking about it now, but I think a lot of that has to do with how I’ve been forced into shapes of what others needed by the people who had the remote by default.

What is crazy in our society – outright insane – is the stigma associated with seeking help with mental health. It’s availability, too, is a problem for many people.

There’s nothing wrong with going and getting a checkup, letting a professional peek under the hood and give you an unbiased opinion.

It seems sort of insane not to.

You look familiar.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

Why, hello there.

I don’t know how you got here. Hopefully you returned of your own volition and not under duress (blink twice if you’re under duress). Yet here you are, it’s Sunday, and I have a chicken in the oven.

I have some time to kill.

I might be able to tell what country you’re from, be it in the United States, The UK, Uganda, Trinidad and Tobago, China, India, Portugal, Singapore, Belgium Australia, Canadaor Denmark as I’ve seen some of you. I like people from around the globe, so it’s nice of you to stop by.

I also don’t know where you go when you leave.

That sounds a bit like life in general. People come, people go, some people visit, some don’t. It’s the way of things.

Maybe you found something you were looking for here, and you may gladly take it with you as you go onto wherever your next destination is. Sooner or later I might hassle you for a cup of coffee. It’s what I do. I find when people stop by I like to have some coffee with them.

Some people like tea, which I’m not a connoisseur of so I’m generally poorly stocked unless you want rubber tree leaf tee, which I’ve never heard of but am sure I can prepare with all sorts of puns.

Anyway. It’s Sunday, so hopefully you’re decompressing from the world outside. Maybe you wish to just vegetate a while – a dangerous thing with vegetarianism becoming so militant – and that’s fine. I like thinking about big things, myself, because they put the smaller matters in perspective.

If you’re nitpicking small things you might be missing the big things. Look out for that. Big things can be trains, and the wise perceive approaching things. The intelligent are all over the track, bits and pieces, some bits sliced, some crushed, and in time, both.

I’m not sure if that’s my foot over there. Both of mine still seem to be attached, but that foot really does look familiar.

It’s good to have the time to navel gaze, to have the space to think of what is possible rather than what the world allows you to do – the forked paths of progress lashing at the feet of the very people on them. Today is your day to dip your feet in the pool and soak them a bit, to bandage your hurts, but be careful not to bind your hurts to you.

Just tend the wounds and let the hurts go in their own time. Either you’ll grow callous or find a new path. I’d suggest the new path, but that comes with different hurts to bind, so be on your toes. Unless, your toes are where your hurts are.

You’re looking better already. A few deep breaths. Time will bring to you the paths again, but for now you have that respite, that bit of sunshine in the face with the cool wind blowing over you – that moment of peace that is the real price of the paths.

Come back sometime. You’re good company.

To What End?

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Every now and then, I start a post on one site and end up putting it on another. Sometimes it’s an accident that I twist toward the particular site, like I did with ‘To What End?‘. That was actually supposed to be here, but I had already written most of it when I glanced up and saw it was on KnowProSE.com – but since it went with productivity, I rolled with it.

In essence, it wasn’t worth the time and energy to move it over here – which would have been a few clicks – when it works just as well over there with a few tweaks.

What I didn’t mention over there is that the real reason I was writing it was also related to some other stuff my psychologist and I had spoken about. It relates to unraveling myself, and to some degree it falls into the same category. Some questions are worth pursuing, some not.

One of the questions I’m considering is taking a consult to go talk to someone else to see if I score on the autism spectrum. Many people over the course of my life have suggested that, but I filed that away under consistently testing as an INTJ over the course of the decades. Laypeople can’t really tell the difference largely because both personality types and autism are so popularly misunderstood.

So here’s the thing. I’m comfortable with my psychologist, and I’m not sure going to talk to someone else for a few sessions is what I should do, and the question is – to what end? I’m already in my 50s, so it’s not really going to have an impact on anything. To what end is knowing that? How will knowing that help with anything? I am who I am now, who I have become.

That’s where, “To what end” is really supposed to go – yet I started writing about that stupid parking thing and how idiotic it was to waste so much time over one incident, which is funny because I wasted even more time on it. I spend a lot of time laughing at myself. Try it.

I’m not sure that seeing if I’m on the autistic spectrum has value to me. Of course, I researched it, and Autism Speaks had maybe not too much to say about it. That’s fair. It’s not something that should be marketed. This article was a little more helpful, Autism in Adults: Recognizing the Signs, Living with a Diagnosis, and it has some benefits but also some coping strategies that might just work anyway.

I generally have plans for things, and I suppose when my psychologist suggested looking at a formal diagnosis I didn’t have a plan for that. I don’t have a plan for a positive or negative diagnosis, either. Not having a plan can be exhilarating. I love new problems, new knowledge, new systems… but this, for some reason, has me a bit anxious and I don’t know why.

I’d be interested to get some feedback from people who got testing and how it went either way.