Thank you for your caring. I was at the suicidal ideation around this point in 2016, at which time I decided to get put back on medication. I appreciate what you’re saying, where your heart is, and your concerns, but as a person who has spent the last 7 years examining everything about his life, and who has a past with a few serious traumas, and…well… is the person who I am, I am frustrated, and at times angry at present thinking on depression and suicide. I’m nearly constantly desperate because it’s getting worse and worse, and there is SO MUCH content, attention spans REALLY HAVE diminished to a dangerous and terrifying level, and essentially all anybody can muster is to find some abstract sympathy.

Please forgive some of the anger that is about to be released. If you really want to help, you’ll try your best to listen through it.

Even beginning to write this is causing a lurch in my stomach because I’m 99.99% sure absolutely nothing is going to happen by ripping open these wounds yet again — even worse, I probably have family members who stalk me at a distance who will roll their eyes and think I’m parading my stuff in ‘another attempt at getting attention’ as if that is actually my primary need and motivation for this.

I’m at work nearly at tears because this has been my reality for so long, now.

Not just my family, but everyone.

I stopped pretending long ago, but the cold hard truth is that NOBODY REALLY GIVES A SHIT. No, seriously, you think you do, but you don’t. You write this post, but that’s pretty much all that will come of this — people will pensively consider it and go about their day.

“Mental Illness” gets even MORE reinforced as a disease — WHICH IS THE PROBLEM. It’s a disease in as much a puncture wound from being stabbed is a disease. THINK ABOUT THIS. LOOK AT THE PICTURE IN YOUR MIND. THINK ABOUT A KNIFE TWISTING IN YOUR GUT THAT SOMEBODY STABBED YOU WITH. THEN, EVERYBODY AROUND YOU SAYS YOU HAVE A DISEASE OR AN ILLNESS. The whole idea is self-reenforcing gaslighting! Do you get it? Does anybody get it?

Then, think about people like me having to swallow that down more and more and more and more and more and more and more until we find our medication, or, if we do take action, continue down a road of increasing medication or addiction or denial or avoidance.

Sure, there are people who can work through it with therapy and exercise and whatever else lifts your endorphins. The truth is this is a pit and some people are further down it than others.

Not only do I have more trauma than average, I have a family who is extra-steeped in denial, and once a person is diagnosed, given the opportunity to look at their own shit, or pity the person who is diseased so that they feel good about their own empathy, which one do you think they pick? Which one do you think they fucking pick over and over and over again?

It may be more acute with families like mine, but this is a society-wide problem, and it’s more than just depression — the denial is everywhere, on every level, and deepening — because the truth is too hard to bear.

My story is INSANE — ripe with amazing amounts of detail, experience, analysis, and frankly even entertaining in a sort of salacious way, if you’re far enough removed. But it’s TERRIFYING for others. Nobody wants any part of it, for fear of what they’ll have to face within themselves.

The irony is overwhelming. For someone to do what I have done — for someone to be as functional as I am, all things considered, and to have most people around me react in the way they have is astounding — and yet, I still have a ‘disease’ that needs treatment.

Here’s the laundry list:
My mother almost certainly had a sexually abusive father, especially towards one of her sisters — the pattern is so sickeningly obvious. (Her sister drank herself to death, my mother is the one who ran and is totally vivacious, overweight, and and actor who lives in a dream world of her own imagining) Her sister learned to put her head in the sand to a degree that she married a Columbia evangelist who had a giant church and school ministry in Columbia, and for the length of her marriage was bringing young ‘at risk’ boys into the house and ‘training them up’ so that he could ‘date’ them at 18. (I’m *sure* he waited until they were 18..) He was murdered in Columbia a couple years ago.

As a result, from the time I was old enough to be apart from her, until I refused to go to her church in my mid teens, my siblings and I were put in situations that were ‘sexually dangerous’ OUR ENTIRE LIVES. From neighbors to church choice, to CONSTANT choices of friends — she did this very much obviously not just because she learned to ignore it, but because she was DRAWN to it.

I don’t know for certain, but I contain pretty much all the symptoms for moderate disassociation, which is highly correlated with sexual abuse. I do have some very light memories of one particular case, and there is another theory about another situation I have that sounds insane to the degree that even saying it out loud would make other people ignore me completely. So that one I keep to myself.

At least one member of my immediate family is very much confirmed to be a victim.

On top of this, the outright lies she told us in the name of ‘the greater good’ — that she and my father waited until marriage to have sex and the rest of the denial that came with that interpretation of religion gave us such a bad understanding of reality, I had my own sexual damage that led to a mental breakdown, my ‘diagnosis’ and the end of my marriage.. (Though my selection of spouse was done through the lens of this dysfunction, so it was pretty much doomed no matter what)

She thinks she’s a good person who gave us gifts and tried the best she could, and the most she’ll admit to is that she ‘should have erred on the side of grace instead of the law’

I was in a school shooting when I was 12 in 1988. You can read about it on my medium page, but the upshot is THE ANSWER IS ITS ALL OF US. Not ‘mental illness’ not gun control, our disgustingly sick society that keeps getting worse.

I’m in a field where I worked my ass off, rose to success, then lost my home in 2008 when one part of Bank of America couldn’t talk to another part. Now, my field is paying less and less and requiring more and more. I have no idea what I’m going to be doing in 10 years, let alone for the rest of my life.

And through all of this, I watched it all — and so much more — with a perspective that almost no one can match, put together some amazingly complex patterns, and when they finally click with people, they just fade away and go about their lives, unsure of how to deal with it.

Sometimes, they ask me “what should we do?” with the implication that it’s my responsibility not only to inform them of the mechanism of the problem, but also an insanely complex plan to improve it.

Then, you have to deal with the MASSIVE army of professionals who make their livings on “our illness” — Drugmakers, psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists — who don’t actively try to make it worse, but are absolutely BLIND to the idea that there’s a different way of looking at things, because THEY WOULD INVALIDATE YEARS OF EXPERIENCE, STATUS, AND EDUCATION.

Honestly, you want to know the BIGGEST mental illness? It’s THAT denial. It’s the denial Southern Evangelicals like my mother have about the higher-than-average sexual dysfunction due to the structure of their culture — the insanely blinding hypocrisy that would allow them to support someone like Donald Trump, though he stands for essentially everything that runs in opposition to their ideology.

It’s in no way limited to the Christian conservatives — pretty much everyone will defend their own utility and necessity, and blame ‘the other.’ The absurd denial liberals were in during 2016 when it came to the DNC and Hillary Clinton was just as dysfunctional as the conservatives.

The story is a long one, but I called so many people during 2016 — the DNC, Schumer, NBC News, the Washington Post, the New York times, my local Democratic reps — I went into the local Hillary office 6 weeks out from the election as a last, knowingly futile resort. I’m sure the 5 or 6 people in their will remember me clearly when I desperately, with a raised voice said, ‘You know she’s a poison pill, right?’

They go on and on about russian meddling and cambridge analytica and completely glance over the fact that there’s proof the DNC was doing dirty things too — and honestly ‘Correct the Record’ wasn’t much different than Russian meddling.

There *IS* something to the email servers, there IS smoking gun proof that has been completely ignored in the media of attempts to meddle with the data by the IT admin before they were ‘accidentally deleted.’

Trump might be the worst thing that happened in the history of the Presidency, but it’s not unreasonable to think that Hillary might have actually committed treason herself.

Why did I make this political? To show you where I was at BEFORE the election — besides a rough job and family situation, I was SHOUTING about all of these issues — INCLUDING Russia and Hillary’s issues. I registered ‘therealitywar.com’ 9 months before the words ‘Fake News’ were even mentioned. I shit you not, I even called Oprah in a desperate attempt to say, “hey, you should step in — you’d win” 18 months before a news story broke about rumblings of the same.

THIS is why I was suicidal in 2016 — ALL THESE THINGS.

But here’s the cherry on top — In Feb 2016, I actually talked to Edward Snowden on stage at JHU and asked him a question about digital leverage and secrets that could affect national security and foreign policy (this was implied — long story) He dodged the question, and went on to double down on the necessity of Encryption — which is insane, because there’s a new hack every week that we know about — all of those systems are encrypted, and all crackable — and this is just the stuff that makes it public.

I got an email this week from ‘https://haveibeenpwned.com/’ about a HUGE hack with the most sensitive data imaginable — and it’s the SEVENTEENTH breech on that email address alone.

I could go on and on about how leveraged the global economy is, or the dangers of the geopolitical situation and how I’ve been talking about the ascendancy of Russia and China since 2011 in the wake of the brewing factors — BUT NONE OF THIS MATTERS.

Nobody gives a shit. Yeah, this is a pile of stuff that’s incomprehensible to most. It didn’t start this way — This was just a quick trip about halfway down.

I know I’m not a ‘usual’ case — but the more people I talk to with similar issues, the more I have come to understand about this. I would wager I understand more about the human psyche and development than a great number of therapists — I like to tell people “I’ve got a little bit of everything”

This, combined with a particular kind of “genius” for pattern recognition has resulted in nothing but more and more depression and unhappiness, because I’ve learned that if you put a pattern together that is scary or dangerous, people not only want to hear it, they will quote chapter and verse reasons that are not their own about why I’m wrong, without even considering that they are.

I call myself a “genius/idiot” because I am lacking a kind of ability to do basic things — like communicate without overwhelming — and it’s getting worse, the more these things pile up, and I bottle them up in order to function.

So, you want me to stop pretending? Cause I’ll be one of those crazy people shouting on the corner — or forced to be drugged out of my mind with a chemical lobotomy.

So — on the off chance you got this far — if ANYBODY got this far I can tell you step 1, if you care to know — I’ve given up hope we’ll get to step one, but ok.

We need to cross cultural, party, religious, economic divides and realize ‘we have a serious problem that is getting worse.’ Like in mass shootings — an acute reflection of this.. But we’re on to the next news story with no resolution, just question mark after questionmark left by the wayside.

The answer, I’m telling you, is that ‘its all of us’ ‘its denial’ ‘its increasing’ and we are more than one generation into a complete illusory reality.

The iceberg is coming. I hope I can become resigned to that fact and learn to just enjoy the ride off the cliff and find someone to ride beside me without jumping off the boat first.

Because I am sane. I don’t have a disease. I have been systematically gaslit, and though you mean well, you are part of the problem.

Stop quoting mental health professionals and JUST LOOK.

Thank you, I’m sorry, you’re welcome, and goodnight.