Musings

Dear Men*

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For anyone reading this here are some content warnings: rape (mentioned / referenced), Non-consent, toxic masculinity.

* Your instinct before even reading this article is going to be to say #NotAllMen. There’s a lot of ways to say it, so I’m here to challenge you. Are you up for the challenge? If not, stop reading now.

Instead of saying #NotAllMen, just read through what we’re trying to say. There’s emotional labor involved here, emotional labor required by you. You have to do it. Feel free to take help from some friends, but try to give them a neutral entry to the article, text, tweet/toot, video you’d like to discuss, to not pre color their response.

Since emotional labor is difficult, especially when you’ve barely learnt anything about it, but only received tips to repress it your entire life I want to present to you with a simple guide. Again, this will only work if you’re willing to try, and it will probably be a disaster the first time you do it, which is why I’m going to recommend that you either keep it to yourself or share it with someone you trust.

In this case I’d suggest prefacing it with something like: “I’m practicing to not react instinctively to these texts women/POC share of their experiences, but rather reflect on what it triggers in me so I can understand myself, and become a better person. Would you mind having a conversation with me about what I came up with the first time I tried this specific technique I got recommended?” what’s key here is that you’re asking for consent before you offload your emotional burden on someone else, if they don’t feel they have time or energy give them that. As in, don’t press it, and don’t be an ass about it.

The next few things you need to do for your self before you share it with anyone else. Pick an article you’ve already read recently that you reacted strongly to where you wanted to scream at the screen “not me I’m not like this, not all men are like this” (or something similar, you know the bubbly rage I’m talking about). It’s important to note here that this kind of trigger is not the same as a PTSD trigger. But rather it’s a an event which leads to another, like pressing a button will turn the lights on. Except you see red. Okay, let’s carry on.

So, you’ve found an article, which you probably shared on your Facebook or Twitter with some snide remark, or in that “men’s club” Facebook group you have with your close pals. Yes, we know about those, yes even your friends girlfriend and wives, they definitely know everything you say about them in there, but that’s an article for another day.

Identify what is making you feel like you want to scream ‘not all men, not me!’ Done? Oh yeah, I should probably say, identify it by reading the article again. And wait for that pang in your chest. Or the moment when you want to share it with someone else to tell them what a complete idiot the author of the piece is, or when you want to look up articles to prove this author wrong (not all need apply, and it can be several or non of these, but I think you get the gist).

Now look at it again, what in you is making you scared, fearful and uncomfortable?

Are you afraid?

Would you admit fear?

Let me guide you with three questions about what you are feeling, feel free to go back to these at any time and add additional questions which help you (even leave them in the comments if you like):

  • Are you afraid that this (described behavior) is you?
  • Are you afraid that you’ve done this to someone you actually cared about because you did not know how to express yourself otherwise?
  • Are you afraid that your friends will shun you if they find out? That your girlfriend will break up with you if you tell her about that one time you didn’t respect consent (or didn’t understand it yet?, or something else along these lines)

Yes, these questions are focused on fear, because I genuinely believe this is the main driving response to these kind of texts. However, it is completely valid if you identify other root emotions, in your journey.

The things you tell us when you comment directly to us are usually along the lines of “not me nor any of my friends have ever done any of these behaviors or anything which could lead to it”. Yet, as we know “everyone knows someone who’s been raped but no one knows a rapist.”

We as a society is not really taught to reflect upon our own reactions and emotions. Why did this make me mad? Surprisingly often it’s fear.

I’m not here to change your mind, but I believe you’ve read this far because you want to change your mind, or you would’ve done some of the things I already mentioned being a typical behavior as reactions to these kind of texts.

Remember that it’s a journey, and you’re likely to fuck up a few hundred times more, but if you use every single one of them as an chance and opportunity to grow, and learn something about yourself you will soon be rich in experiences and be able to help someone else.

If you enjoyed this little article of musings, and would like me to be able to write them more, feel free to head over my patreon and check out the tiers there, $1 can go a long way!
alternatively, check out my support page for more info.

Musings

What a day can look like

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I wanted to frame it as mental health, but there’s so much more than that. The states I live with are not only mental health, sometimes it’s physical, sometimes it’s a combination. What comes with it is a lot of exhaustion, the mental exhaustion which manifests physically. The mental warnings, which then give physical warnings. When you don’t listen to those warnings the big pain comes, and the complete and utter loss for words, literally.

As I get exhausted I lose words, which I guess is ironic when I’m writing these words now, on one of those days. But if I were to have a conversation with my partner I’d not know what a frying pan is called, or not remember what day it is. I think it’s Tuesday today, but I only know that because I’m home from my Tuesday class today.

Fabulous Femme posed against a white pillar, looking into the camera. The natural light from the window lights her up. Wearing a grey dress with long sleeves, hair up.
Just one of those days.

The image above shows what I looked like today when I could not leave the house. Well, that’s not entirely true, I did leave the house. I left the apartment, went down to my bike, but I could not touch or unlock my bike.

– Bahumbug, that’s ridicilous, what do you mean you couldn’t even touch your bike? You were right there, outside, fully dressed, back packed, breakfast eaten, and you couldn’t? Why not?

I am not sure why not. But let me tell you some of the process which led me to not leaving.

First, I woke up still exhausted, after 8hrs of sleep. Every limb was very heavy. On those days I use my phone to help me wake up, I will read until my mind is a bit more functional, so any social media like Twitter or Mastodon is usually a go, find people’s morning chirps and toots, or articles.
I wanted to go to a creative writing reading today at uni, I knew my friends were going. I reached out and said “I want to join you, but I don’t think I have the energy”.
With my phone in bed I felt the sore shoulder blades still hating me, from the arm I pulled the other day, when trying to finalize my written take-home exam (which I couldn’t finished because my body physically told me stop).

Second, I did get up, and I was like “Okay I can do this, I’ll be a little late, but I’ll just get dressed, eat and go.” So, I got dressed, as you can see in the image above, I packed my bag, and I felt like I could do it, I even felt like I looked nice today. I plugged in my headphones, started listening to the audiobook, which usually helps distract me enough to leave as well.

Third, I’m fully dressed with hoodie, scarf, hat, and coat. I go down the elevator, and as I reach the entry-hall, and go towards the door, I start walking slower. I open the door, and tell myself, just make it out to the bike and you’ll be okay. I see the rain, the wet water on the seats. And I stop in my tracks.

No.

“I’m just going to go in.” I turn around. “But I’ve made it so far.” I turn back around towards the bike again. “I really don’t want to get on the bike, okay if I’m not going to go to school I’ll just take a walk” I start walking out towards the street to walk. I stop again, just under the building. “If I’m going for a walk, I could just as well make it to school.” I turn around to the bike again, and walk there. Still not touching the bike. “I… can’t”. I turn around, and decide to go inside. I check the mail. The box is empty except for a newspaper. I go outside again. “…” I turn around, and go in to the elevator. I do not hit the button. I lean my head against the wall, and try to tell myself that “it’s okay to go, it’ll be okay, it’s fine, you can do it, it’s just 2hrs, it’s fine once you get there, you know this” I step out to the bike again. A few steps closer. I go back in, into the elevator, and up to our floor. Each step down the hall “I can still turn around and go to school, I can do it.”

After going back in, admitting to my partner that I couldn’t go, but at least I tried. I feel relieved. Like always, as soon as I say “It’s okay to not go” I feel like I probably could’ve gone, but trying again would be stupid.

I message my class mates that I, yet again, couldn’t make it to class. And I think about how I’m dressed, how pretty I look, and how no one would’ve been the wiser if I had gone. No one would’ve seen the struggles on me.

But you, who’ve read this text, who’ve felt these days yourself, you can probably see it in my eyes when you look at the photo. Because I can, I can see the pain right there. Behind what’s not really even a smile.

Musings

Writing seamlessly

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Or so I thought. Running the app was helping me a lot it write, but now it won’t publish, or upload drafts and I’m unsure if why. 

I will keep investigating it to figure out what I can do, as I miss having this easy way of publishing. I’ve set up an alternative, which will hopefully help a little, but it’s not the same. Maybe I’m just whiney. 

Hi, I am still around and I still want to write, I’ve just been exhausted, am still exhausted. I’ll give you all a better update eventually. 

Take care of yourselves and each other in the meanwhile.

Edit: apparently it’s working now, and there’s only one blog post, which I’ve deleted that fails to upload, makes sense

Musings

Mastodon, compassion vs Facebook, in your face.

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After having spent a good 1.5 years on Mastodon, I feel like I just get bombarded with crap on Facebook that I don’t want to see / not comfortable with seeing.

Why? It’s not because my friends are bad people, it’s because Facebook doesn’t offer a way for my friends to add content warnings which protect the images.

On Mastodon, while it has it’s flaws, you can choose to put up a warning for what your content contains.

You can use this for Trigger Warnings, Sensitive Subjects, Food, and even SPOILERS for movies/series. Or just put your nerdy discussions behind it, and let people opt in to see it.

People will only see it if they click through, and it’s such a different experience. Even though I mostly almost always click through I find that when I’m prepared it’s a lot easier to deal with.

It allows the people posting to be cognizant about what they put out there, and how it presents to other people. It makes a lot of the people on the platform a lot more compassionate, than I’ll ever see here on Facebook unfortunately.

Musings

Sleep and Mental Health

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I accepted that if I’m going to study full-time I need to rest when tired, and sleep at night. This was hard, even if I know it on an intellectual level, accepting it on the emotional level was not something I’ve really been able to do.

Yesterday I both napped, and slept at a reasonable hour. 3hr nap when I got home from uni, and 10hr sleep from midnight, approximately. I was a lot more tired yesterday than I thought I was, and “crashed” when I came home from uni. Note, I could’ve been home all day, but I wanted to get some stuff done, pick up a book and do some studying, so I went to uni. When I got home we had food ready as leftovers, and I could eat before resting (thank you past me).

What I’m trying to get at is this: I will still need to rest today because I’ve been at it all week. Even if I feel surprisingly rested already by allowing myself to both nap yesterday and sleep at night.

Again, there was an emotional “I’ve been good all week, let me be up all night and game”-response which I had to fight, not too hard luckily. I did it by just examining how I was feeling, and which was stronger, and tired was it. After a 10hr night, I’m still going to take it very easy today, but do a few things around the house to make us both feel better, to make next week even easier to deal with.

I do feel like if I keep at this balancing I should be okay. And I need to process and remind myself what works and what doesn’t work. As well as, why it works or why it doesn’t work.

Uncategorized

The Night Owl

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This morning, I felt good about having gone to bed early last night, and that sparked a conversation on Mastodon about Night Owls.

I realized that, as a night owl it had helped me to figure out Why I enjoyed being up at night in order to be able to enjoy going to bed early and waking up early. This can also be combined with why I would enjoy going to bed early, but I’ll try to cover that in another post.

For me it’s the silence and calm that comes over the City at night, a lot less cars, almost no people, animals are resting too. And usually it gets a lot cooler.

If I get up early I can still get some of that calm before the morning rush, and if I go shopping while everyone else is at work I catch it too. Oh, also, going out to the park early in the day as the sun is coming up is its own tranquility. Or a morning walk to get to work / school.

I can seize the means of my tranquility by finding space ever day to lay down and ground myself, find quiet areas, ask that we do not have stuff on the speakers all day, as well as tuning out the world with classical music.

The darkness is also very calming at night, and helps me get work done. Lucky for me, as I’m going back to Uni for studies, I’ve found that the silent cubicle at the university, is a glass box for reading, where you’re not allowed computers or sound on your phone. There are drapes up as well which block out most of the light. This space turned out to be a great place for me to hide for a bit and get some energy and focus.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: If you want to change a habit try to identify what about that habit makes you want to do it, and see if you can fill that need some other way. Do it alone or with a friend.

If you enjoyed this little article of musings, and would like me to be able to write them more, feel free to head over my patreon and check out the tiers there, $1 can go a long way!

Journey, Musings

A journey in writing and editing

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This particular journey started about 9 years ago, when I began using the internet for activism, and eventually got my first Netbook.

Thinking about it it’s possible that it began even earlier when I was in my teens, hanging out on IRC and eventually learning to write scripts for mIRC. I began programming.

That interest stayed with me, while the interest to write had already been with me since I started to learn how to write. I kept a diary when I was 8 years old, and eventually I began writing more and more in it, always caring a diary with me in later grades in school.

Different communities provided diary functions, what I didn’t realize at the time was that this was basically blogging, and I did it a lot. Even when I had a physical notebook to write in by hand, I would also keep a public, to friends or everyone on the platform, diaries.

The first one was plain text, which eventually got some formatting options, and if you understood how to use them you were some kind of wizard. But I wanted to learn, play around and find my own esthetic.

But, the journey I’m more interesting in is from html text editors and CLI, and shunning WYSIWYG, to be now actually preferring to work with editors which help me along the way.

Basically it’s a mental health thing, an allocation of resources. Finding that I’m now incapable of running Linux which tbh even the best of visuals still rely heavily on the command line, and opting for windows “because it just works”.

Yes, I’ve run my own wp server. I’ve had two Ubuntu servers to play around with. One for media and one for internet stuff (the WordPress, as well as irc related stuff). And yes I’ve run Ubuntu on my Netbook. I’ve fixed broken windows installs with help of Linux, and used to write really noob guides for Linux when I got started with it because there wasn’t any that were on a low enough level to teach me the lingo etc.

I used to prefer plain text, and just focus on writing first and formatting later. I’d be able to crank out an idea without looking at it until later, sometimes already formatting in code format because of the editor.

Today I have been trying out the new Gutenberg editor with WordPress, and I’m finding it very rewarding to use, for me in the place I’m at right now. What I mean is, because of various brain fog and other difficulties it helps me to be able to just view the visual and find the correct button.

So I went from this to only running Windows or Osx (because we have two MacBooks in the household), not launching my own servers or self hosting in other ways. And writing in editors which help me along.

My journey had taught me that wysiwyg editors etc. serve a purpose, and help those who need it. Currently for me, with CFS/me it’s just too much mental overhead to set up my own server, learn a new platform to work with, instead of just picking something I already know.

On that note though I’m currently trying to baby step when I want to try new things, and there’s progress being made, but we can talk about that another day. Being able to choose what I do where, gives me a lot more space to learn new things, and energy to write more blog posts. I feel like we’re on to something here.

This post had been updated from its first draft to add in a few more paragraphs.

If you enjoyed this little article of musings, and would like me to be able to write them more, feel free to head over my patreon and check out the tiers there!

Musings

Disorganized publishing – publishing on the go

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While writing at the keyboard at the computer is quite nice, swiping away at the phone is a whole other beast.

I’ve learnt that I can touch swipe better if I’m looking at the word in writing rather than looking at keyboard. Which is interesting. I think it’s easier to remember the approximate motion of the swipe by just not looking at the keyboard, when I do it always feels like I’m missing

Example of wiring with the apple store function while looking at the keyboard

Example of looking at the text instead.

I did change what I wrote, because I started editing. Maybe I should make a video some day to show you all how smooth this is.

I have two words that always get written wrong when I look at the keyboard :

Thank has been plaguing me for the past few months always turning into Thanh and Thang…

Remember I had to rewrite three times just now.

That said, I guess this is my endorsement for SwiftKey!

Yes, I know they basically track everything I type, but it’s so valuable to be able to just swipe away.

If you enjoyed this little article of musings, and would like me to be able to write them more, feel free to head over my patreon and check out the tiers there!

Musings

When the world around you gives up and forgets you

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While a lot of the work I do do is public and visual, all the work I can’t do, is for quite obvious reasons, invisible.

That I can stream may be indicative of the fact that I should be able to work. And maybe it is but I just can’t see it myself, maybe I haven’t gotten far enough to make something worth while out of it. This isn’t a text about giving up, but rather about feeling invisible, and it’s going to get personal and it’s going to suck. But here goes.

I most likely have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or something similar or close to it, while I thought I was already diagnosed with it, it turned out I wasn’t diagnosed with the Chronic one, even though I can trace it back to being 17 years old, if not earlier. So there’s things I need to do to get the help I need to be able to live, things that I can’t get myself to do because I do not have enough energy. Energy in this capacity is often referred to as spoon, as per Spoon Theory, which tends to help people who struggle with mental health or chronic pain issues, explain why they do not have energy, or why they can’t take care of themselves.

I am a very sociable person, I’m just bad at reaching out to people who are important to me, and family in particular. I reach out to my family when I’m in trouble, and I wait until I’m in a deep hole I can’t get out of on my own. I reach out to friends who I have showed that I can pay back when I can’t afford to pay off some shit, especially since I thought I had a job, turned into me not having a job, and not having an income and now I can’t pay them back. No, this isn’t a begging for support, post. I’m beyond that. I won’t do it, it’s not my style. So I’m here providing content, if you may, so there will be a reason to support me, and the stuff I do.

Other visible things I am able to do, which you probably see that I do is the streaming, which I already touched upon. Streaming is something I can do from home, without having a shower (on my worst days), and push over that threshold of anxiety that would leave me paralyzed and not able to leave the house. Again this loops back to “But if you can stream, why can’t you get a normal job?”, who would want to keep me hired if every few days I collapse in tears, or can’t get to work because I’m exhausted or crying? What work could I do that doesn’t drain me entirely? There was one thing, and it’s something I may be able to do again, and that is working with community and taking care of community.

Sharing this post, may actually turn into being detrimental to getting a possible job in the future, so be it, because I need to talk about these feelings.

Yesterday, which I guess is the trigger for this, I saw that people close to me, close to my heart was finally close by geographically, my sisters. And they were just across the bridge, and if they would’ve wanted to, they could’ve seen me, or let me know that they were “in town”, I would have dipped into those savings and headed over, because being allowed to see them if just for a few hours, instead of spending more than 16hrs of travel to try and go to where they live (I say more, because 16 is if you go by car, with no stops). But I did not get the chance to go see them yesterday, or if it was the day before, who knows when Instagram shows you these things. I did not even get a “hey we’re going to be in Copenhagen, but we can’t make time to see you for x y z reason”, I could have lived with that. But I’m afraid that they didn’t reach out to me, because they know I don’t have enough money for rent, and probably didn’t want me to ask for money to be able to see them.

I am considering throwing myself out on the job market, even though it scares the crap out of me, and then work myself until I’m totally exhausted and broken and end up on full-time sick-leave again, because that would be a way to pay the rent. Unfortunately, because I’m in between, and not sick enough, but also not well enough I can’t get help. Because I followed my heart and my passion last year, I lost any chance to get supported via the Swedish welfare system, because that system isn’t adaptable to people like me, people who may get spurts of energy, but then be nonfunctional for the other 75% of the year.

Maybe this is why my rate is pretty high, because I need to be able to afford not being able to work. I need to be able to pay the proper taxes and insurances to handle getting sick. Does that mean that what I can give when I can give isn’t worth it? I wouldn’t think so.

Who wants to support someone who’s just sad and depressed, that’s what we ask ourselves a lot of the time isn’t it? Even when we are being supported, we view ourselves worthless, because in a capitalist world, you’re only worth as much as you can produce, and maybe even then you’re not good enough.

What I’m trying to say I guess, is that I do not know how we’ll be able to support ourselves this fall, but we have made due this year, barely scraping by, with some extra pushes around Xmas, and for my birthday. If we can’t get money from studying this fall, we may be fucked. But we’ll deal with that when we come to it.

Making due, and barely making due. We’re okay, I mean we have a roof over our heads, but as soon as we can’t pay rent anymore, then what? I don’t know. Anyways, summer still has a lot to bring, and I can maybe write more again, finish the revamp of my patreon, continue streaming, and figure out if I have enough energy to squeeze anything else into this. Thank you for reading, and… I think you know where the tip jars are, if you feel so inclined.