Month: June 2024

Stand or Fall – Overthinking Things Vs. Not Thinking Anything Through At All

In the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (here’s a audiovisual presentation by John Oliver you can watch if you don’t know what Project 2025 is to begin with), a lot of it involves dismantling various government agencies like Department of Education and Department of Justice along with public health initiatives and other government programs and replacing them with nothing, evil corporate overlords or worst of all, under a single-ruler dictatorship.

To put it bluntly here, the bastards who have come up with this Project 2025 shit, aka Mein Kompf 2.0, haven’t thought anything through. Because fascists and corporate overlords are in reality, dumber than dogshit. Yet they think they’re smartest people in the room simply because if they don’t like something or they don’t understand how it works, they just shit-can it and round up anyone who doesn’t agree with them and well… we know what the Nazis did and I think these bastards want to do the same thing. And all because they don’t want to share anything with anyone not exactly like them. They think the world is fucked up because they’re being pushed out and people are calling them out on their bullshit and not enough people are going along with their shit.

I spent seventeen years in what I call corporate call-center hell and I’ve always said the worst part was not getting yelled at over the phones every day (that was just part of the job description), it was being told how to do my job by people who didn’t do it on a daily basis like I did, and never had done it, or had only done it for a fraction of the time I did it. Yet these people refused to provide any real resources to help us on the phones and provide the service they wanted us to. We made things work behind the scenes in so many convoluted ways I’m surprised we all didn’t crack up though most of us have walked away from that line of work and haven’t looked back. The worst part was having any request, no matter how small, denied not due to any valid reason, but because it would make management look stupid and their egos were the most fragile thing they fought so hard to protect.

It takes a lot of people to build a product, to move it, fix it, and service it. Right-wing nuts and corporate management idiots don’t understand this at all. I honestly don’t see what purpose they have if they don’t contribute to producing the best products and services instead of just servicing their own egos and lining their bank accounts. These are the people who buy a company, butcher it, then sell off the remnants of the carcass while they walk away with bulging pockets full of dirty money to do it all over again. And yet they want to run the country like this?

Hell fucking no.

At this point, if you’re reading this and wanting to slap your hands over your ears or cover your eyes while you make excuses for this, I want you to take your hands off your ears or your eyes, and ask yourself why. Ask yourself why you’re trying to minimize, excuse, or just flat-out deny this won’t become a reality unless we keep these motherfuckers from ever being voted into elected office, or god forbid, trying to attempt another coup all over again like January 6, 2021.

“When someone shows you what they’re truly like, believe them.” – Maya Angelou

I will add to that and say that if someone shows you they will NOT think anything through at all, just slash-and-burn shit rather than stand back and let people do their jobs, why would you let them destroy more shit than they already have? Do you honestly think you’ll benefit from this slash-and-burn shit? Do you honestly think you’ll benefit from trickle-down economics and right-wing fascist dictatorships? Do you honestly think you’ll ever become a part of the oligarchy, the one-percent? Because if you believe then I’ve got real-estate on the Moon to sell you. And if you believe that because you don’t want feminists, black and brown people, immigrants, or gay/lesbian/transgender people to have anything all in life, I want you to ask yourself why you’re buying into that? I want you to ask why you have to live your life with hate simply because you’ve bought into the outrage machine even though you won’t benefit from it since you’re not a part of the one-percent?

One answer to the questions I asked in the previous paragraph is that you might realize you haven’t thought things through very much, and not realize just how complex our world is and what it takes to get shit done. In my former life in corporate call-center hell, one thing that kept people in that world was an ability to think not just on your feet, but in very complex ways sometimes. It was seeing a lot of moving parts and figuring out where the breakdown was. And yes, it did involve working with people who couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag, aka management. I don’t want people who can’t think for shit to run things.

And if you want to call me an overthinking, stuck-up, know-it-all bitch because I think too damn much and see too damn much, go for it. But how about you take a couple of painkillers and try to think instead of coming at me or people who have done the work in the past, people who can multi-task and keep our shit together when everyone else was losing theirs or sitting on their asses doing nothing.

Because if you don’t do your own thinking, no matter how hard it is, someone else will do it for you. And you might not like what they have in mind for you at all.

Choose or Lose.

Breaking Radio Silence – Status Report: The Run Up to the Breaks

Well, I’ve spent the last couple of hours with my book ‘Breaking Radio Silence’ and in that time I’ve sent about fifteen pages of it to the Recycle Bin. Trust me, I needed to do that because what I had was a stream-of-consciousness mess. I’ve been avoiding this for a while because I felt like I was missing something but I couldn’t figure out what that was until yesterday morning when a thought came to me:

No excuses.

Years ago, I stopped making excuses and saying, “In my defense,” and instead I started saying, “In explanation, not defense,”. Because I felt like I didn’t need to defend myself from making mistakes or thinking and feeling the way I did, nor dealing with things the way I did. This in turn made me realize by doing this, I stopped making excuses not just for myself, but for other people, too. Because an excuse doesn’t mitigate the damage done by a mistake, or painful words and actions. We’re all human and we all make mistakes and say and do things we shouldn’t. But my mother used to say it was one thing to make a mistake, but another to make the same mistake again and again. What she meant by that was that we’re all human and make mistakes, but we also need to learn from them.

I’ve said before that I think I began to break my silence as I call it in May of 2014 when I turned forty and told myself I wasn’t doing so bad. Then it really began to break in April 2015 when I told myself everyone else was just as full of shit as I was but that I wasn’t a bad person. These two breaks were very important to me because I stopped beating the crap out of myself and thinking I was the world’s worst person whenever I made a mistake. But now I realize that in order for those two breaks to happen, I had believe in myself and find my self-confidence and self-esteem and realize they hadn’t been lost, just beaten down and frozen solid inside myself.

In July 2013, I changed jobs (took a slight pay cut but got that back in about six months) and I moved into my own apartment (I’d been rooming with a friend and her two sons for a couple of years prior to that). I took a gamble on changing jobs as I always did but I was also apprehensive as hell when I started the training class. I was very quiet and low-key in the class for two reasons:

In August 2011, I was in a training class at another job when the instructor was going along with the training manual, I raised my hand because I had a question about something we were reading. As soon as I opened my mouth, all of my classmates began talking as loudly as they could over me. My instructor told them to stop, which they did, but in turn, she did not demand they apologize to me, nor did she apologize to me for letting it happen. I just sat in my chair frozen and scared that if I said another word she’d toss me out of the class for causing them to talk over me. I hadn’t felt that humiliated in many years and I didn’t stay with that job for too long afterward.

Then in January 2012, I began another training class at the place I’d worked at for five years before (2005-2010). I was happy to be back and happy to discover things hadn’t changed too much. So maybe my enthusiasm was a bit much but one day my instructor took me in for a one-on-one with her and basically told me to keep my mouth shut and not help anyone in the class. The thinly-veiled accusation from her was that I was trying to take over from her, which I wasn’t. Again, I froze and shut myself down. I had a couple of classmates ask me why I was so quiet and I told them I was instructed not to help them. Which I’m sure pissed my instructor off even more and it was the beginning of the end for that job.

So back to July 2013, and I told my instructor Valerie both stories and she was absolutely shocked and horrified. Then the first thing she said was that she would NOT allow that to happen in her classroom, and second, she wanted my help (she’d called me for a one-on-one because she got a look at my resume and saw I had close to fifteen years call-center experience at that point). Valerie was a woman of her word and we became a good team, and she also became my supervisor about a year or so later and was one of the best I ever had. What she gave me though was something I thought I’d lost a long time before and would never get back: a belief in myself. I thought I’d lost all my self-confidence and self-esteem and would never get them back but after that day, I started recovering them.

So from that point forward in 2013, I began to fill an empty space inside myself, and create a safe place for my mind to open up and most importantly, I began to stop beating the shit out of myself and instead, I began to build myself back up.

Now I have a new beginning to my ‘Breaking Radio Silence’ journey to write and it actually goes back to Summer 2009 (a story for another time) but my mind didn’t just go everything is hunky-dory so let’s unpack all your crap. Instead, it said you’ve come this far, now let’s take the next road on the journey.

Conversations From the Road – Coming Out of Hiding (or trying to, anyway)

Poem – Coming Out of Hiding

Today is another two-for-one day here on the blog: the word ‘hiding’ came into my mind this past week and of course I thought about it and came up with some stuff here, too in addition to my poem.

All too often, I’ve felt like I’ve run and hid myself away from the world. I know I did that a lot to escape from bullying, alienation, insensitivity, cruelty, and being frozen out. In those hidden places I used to retreat into books, music, movies, tv shows, and fiction writing. But over the last few years, when I’ve retreated into those hidden places, there was nothing waiting for me there but my thoughts and feelings.

I know I spent a lot of time, probably too much time with books, music, movies, tv shows, and writing fiction. But when I started using writing to get my thoughts and feelings out of my head to where I could see them with my own eyes, I began to lose touch with the other things (books/music/movies/tv shows/writing fiction). I feel like I can’t really settle down and get into things as deeply as I could before. I feel like my mind keeps telling me to focus on my own thoughts and feelings and not to run away from them.

But I’m not running anymore. But it seems I can’t hide anymore either. So what I think I have to do now is create a new way of doing things. Because right now my mind is telling me if I try to get back into books and stuff, that I’m abandoning my recovery. I know that’s bullshit but my brain is fucked up in a lot of ways and it takes time, a lot of time in some cases, to change the way I think and feel about something. Because I have to tell myself a hundred times NO ONE will come at me for getting into books and stuff, and if by some stupid chance someone does, fuck them.

I know in the past I ran and hid because of overload, an overload of thoughts and feelings that I couldn’t let out in any way. I had no real outlet for this as I’ve always tried not to spew out all that I want to say because I’m like a spigot that gets stuck in the ‘on’ position when I start to talk. Hence the reason I give myself two pages typed double-space Times New Roman fourteen-point font here to write and no more to do this.

But now I realize this is yet another issue I have to face in my personal recovery: I can’t go back to the way I was. I’ve known this for a long time because as I’ve said before, once you start asking questions you might not like the answers you find, and sooner or later you have to deal with them. There is a voice inside me that says I’ve dealt with so many of my answers and now I just need to organize all of them into my book projects.

Yet anxiety and fear still rear their ugly heads along with my fucked-up ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) brain that makes focusing a challenge.

So what do I do?

Take it one step at a time.

Identify the problem.

Ask the questions.

Work through the answers

Tell the asshole-voice in my brain to fuck off.

And start to deal with the possibility I won’t be able to retreat back into my blanket fort and just block it all out like I used to do. That I will have to get it out of my system once and for all then hopefully, see a better way forward.

But I’m mourning the loss of that retreat, and it’s not an easy loss to deal with. The old saying of ‘you can’t go home again’ is real and for me it means I can’t be the person I was, and I can’t run and hide anymore.

I have a lot of catching up to do, though. I’ve denied myself so much because of the thoughts and feelings that my mind keeps shoving to the forefront for me to deal with. I have to tell myself not always being with those thoughts and feelings is okay and that NO ONE will have a problem with it, or if someone does they can just fuck off.

Because what I’m looking for are those stolen moments of getting away from the pain, from the icy anger, the screaming matches I had to listen to, the awful words that could never be taken back. I need to learn how to let myself get into things again without letting something pull me out.

Most of all, I need to learn that it wasn’t wrong to run and hide, and immerse myself in my imagination and things instead of talking shit out. Because in the past I couldn’t talk shit out like I can now. But just because I can talk shit out here in my writing doesn’t mean I can’t get back into my imagination, into things that make me happy, indulge my curiosity, and make my heart soar.

Poem – The Depths of My Emotions

Cozumel by Michelle Raponi via Pixababy

Today is a two-for-one special here on my blog but early this morning, around five a.m. (yes, I was up that early to do my first two reservations this morning), I was sitting in the airport waiting lot between those two reservations when this thought came to me:

I am more connected to my emotions and I’m glad for it. In turn, I began to think that would make a good poem. But just as I was about to reach for my notebook and pen (I keep those in my bag at all times), my phone dinged my Uber app told me to start driving to pick up my next reservation (which went very well, and I got a $20 tip from my very lovely passengers).

So, when I got home this morning after I did what I had to do (the previous blog entry was written actually written yesterday), I sat down at the laptop and caught poetry yet again. Hope you like it.

Poem – The Depths of Emotion – pdfDownload

Breaking Radio Silence – The Call of the Road

When I first began to think of living and working on the road, I was thinking that if I wanted to do that in order to run from something instead of dealing with it, then it wouldn’t be a good reason to hit the road. But back then, I read three books by three women who hit the road that made me think about why I was feeling the call of the road: ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ by Elizabeth Gilbert, ‘Wild’ by Cheryl Strayed, and ‘Tracks’ by Robyn Davidson.

In ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, author Eilzabeth Gilbert hits the road after a long and difficult divorce and first goes to Italy (the ‘Eat’ part of the book) where she learns to start accepting herself for who she is and start letting go of bullshit expectations about how to look and that it’s okay for a woman not to want to settle down and live and die in the suburbs (a big issue in her divorce). Then from there she journeys to India (the ‘Pray’ part of the book) where she has a ‘dark night of the soul’ which is when I think you reach the deepest part of yourself and live to tell the tale. Then finally, she lands in Bali and meets her next husband (the ‘Love’ part of the book) and finds a happily-ever-after (for a while as she divorces again though that divorce from what I’ve read was much more friendly than her first divorce). I think she hit the road and dealt with some serious shit but not in a way that was running from it, but in a way that gave her the space to deal with it.

In the book, ‘Wild’, author Cheryl Strayed hikes the Pacific Crest Trail from California to Oregon. After her mother’s death when Cheryl was in her early twenties followed by a difficult marriage and a drug addiction, she comes up with the idea to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. At times, she’s under-prepared and faced with challenges all along the way. But she’s all alone on that trail with her thoughts and feelings and that’s what she needed to deal with them. She proves to herself she can survive and make it in the world despite being knocked on her ass. I don’t think she was running from her feelings and trying not to deal with them, but instead, she was looking for a space to deal with them without distractions from life and other people. Trust me, this has had great appeal to me though I’m not into roughing it or sleeping on the ground as I like some creature comforts.

Finally, the book ‘Tracks’ by Robyn Davidson is about her solo walk in 1977 from the middle of Australia to the Indian Ocean with her dog and four camels. Documented by National Geographic magazine (who funded the trip) and later made into a really great movie, it’s the story of a young woman not only challenging herself and expectations of women at that time, but of facing her own fears and finding her voice. Again, not running from, but walking to. Because after that book, Robyn Davidson has become a best-selling travel writer now in her 70’s. Expectations for her back then were to settle down, marry, and basically keep her mouth shut. Because in her book she’s brutally honest about Australian society, especially in its’ god-awful treatment of Aboriginal people. And in her other books, she’s become a astute observer of people and the worlds they live in.

When I began to think about hitting the road almost ten years ago, I asked myself if I was just running from things I didn’t want to deal with. I don’t think it’s running away and just clamping your hands over your ears, or getting caught up in good food, or on a hiking trail, or trekking across a burning desert that makes you run. But in my own way, I have been on the road. Granted, I stayed in one place, the city of San Antonio, Texas and the surrounding areas but I’ve been on the road almost every day in the last seven years. And in time, my mind opened up and yes, I have dealt with and thought about a lot of things on my Uber runs. I also made a trip to and from Alabama on my own and in spring 2018 and on the road to and from there, I truly realized why the road called to me. In a way, I wished I had put more into making my dream come true back then but I didn’t have the financial means, and most of all, I couldn’t have done anything in the emotional avalanche that followed that trip in 2018.

Now when I look at the road ahead, I know I’m looking to get on it to find a space to deal with things. I’ve done that over the last eight years and now I’m at the stage where I’m writing it all down once and for all. So when I hit the road, I will be at peace like I am now, healing and recovering, and open to new sights and sounds, people and places. I don’t need the road or the trails to deal with grief, pain, or anyone’s bullshit expectations of me. Most of all, I have absolutely nothing to prove to anyone or to myself. I want to hit the road because I want to be on the move, to have my mind free to think and feel. There are stories to tell from the road and maybe I’ll settle down somewhere at some point in time. I’m open to anything and most importantly I’ll say this again, I have nothing to prove to anyone or myself, and I sure as hell won’t live to someone else’s bullshit expectations of me.

Because in a way, my book ‘Breaking Radio Silence’ has been like a journey through the wilderness, learning how to heal through from the ‘dark night of the soul’, and reaching the clear blue waters at the end of this journey. Hitting the road is not running on empty like Jackson Browne sang- it’s more like The Chicks sang about ‘Taking the Long Way’.

Writing Article – So Much More Than Just a ‘Love Interest’

This is a bit of longer piece – a little over 2400 words in a Word document (about five pages single-spaced block paragraph format) but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I use movies to illustrate my points because they’re much more common references and also if you haven’t seen them they’re probably on some streaming service.

So here goes my article, and a bit of a rant, about the term ‘love interest’ and how to not write it.

So Much More Than a Love Interest – Article pdf fileDownload

Uber Tales: On the Road Before and After COVID-19

Over the last year or so I’ve been trying to put into words what it was like for me on the road before and after COVID-19. Prior to COVID-19 people it felt like people were pretty happy-go-lucky at times and the crazy conspiracy theory assholes were fewer and farther in between. But I also knew back then a lot of people were close to burnout, like the businesspeople I had who were traveling two to three weeks out of every month and barely seeing their families. I felt like sometimes people may have been trying too hard to maintain a certain appearance, to go out and party when maybe they didn’t feel like it, or woke up hungover and in bed with someone whose name they couldn’t remember.

I started driving for Uber in 2017 and not long after that I saw the first groups of immigrants dropped off in the middle of downtown San Antonio with nowhere to go. I saw the building across from Travis Park United Methodist Church opened up by the city and people coming down to help these poor refuges with food and clothing, legal and translation services, and even toys for the kids. I remember the Mayor of San Antoino telling the motherfucker in the White House (yes, I hate Donald Trump and I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about that) that if he had a problem with what the city and all the volunteers were doing then he could come down and say that himself (which he didn’t because Trump is a fucking coward along his with band of thugs).

In the first three years on the job, I went over every part of San Antoino, from its’ wealthiest enclaves to its’ poorest ones. In those poor areas I saw people just trying to get through the day, walking to bus stops with kids in tow, walking along streets with boarded-up storefronts, and crumbling buildings and houses. I saw homeless encampments and people sleeping on the streets, and shelters at or over capacity. I saw crowds of tourists, convention goers, and people battling traffic on the roads and highways. I learned just how diverse this city really is, and yes, how disparate the incomes are in this city, too.

On New Year’s Eve 2019 into 2020, the city partied like there was no tomorrow. I was on I-10 going out of downtown at midnight and saw not only the fireworks from the city party downtown, but from all over the city, too. Three months later, the party was over and the city became an empty, hollowed-out shell of itself. I’ll never forget driving up Alamo street downtown shortly after lockdown when all the hotels shut down and the streets were truly empty. It was almost like a horror movie though as I drove by the Alamo that lovely Spring afternoon, a group of bicyclists rode past me waving and their bells. I waved back and smiled a little, glad to see people trying to make the best of a horrible situation.

But I also remember the morgue trucks outside the hospitals, the billowing white tents outside those hospitals, the two nurses I had in the car one day who had come in to help and were talking about everything but their jobs. I remember so many conversations with people who had loved ones deathly-ill in the hospitals, all those who lost someone close to them, and seeing the hundreds of new graves in all the cemeteries around the city. I remember being told I was a hero for staying on the job along with all the other ‘essential’ workers, yet I also remember how people were such assholes about masks and social distancing. Luckily, I only had a couple of passengers give me static about wearing a mask in the car (though they complied with me real fast when I told them I could cancel the ride without getting dinged for it). And luckily no one ever gave me shit for wearing a mask in the car as long as I did (three years).

Prior to COVID, whenever I used to talk about my dream of living on the road in a converted shuttle bus, a lot of the reaction was like I was nuts. After COVID, so many people tell me they’re thinking of doing the same thing- just chucking it all and hitting the road and being done with everyone else’s stupid bullshit. But there will be a part of me that might miss being on the streets every day and having conversations with people like I do.

There are still people out there who are trying to keep up appearances, to be a certain way and also, a fair number that have their personality-type set to ‘asshole’. These are the jerkwads that probably ride my bumper and use their cellphone while driving, but also the ones that treat service workers like shit (luckily, it’s been a long time since I’ve had an absolute jerkwad in the car with me). But there are more people today who are kinder, and more focused on what truly matters in this world, which is taking care of others, being kind, and not buying into anyone’s mean-ass bullshit or dumb-ass appearances.

So what is the biggest difference before and after COVID on the road?

That more people every day realize how short life is and to make the most of what you got, and live a good life and not worry about what other people might think about that.

And try to make the dream of hitting the road and leaving it all behind come true.

Behind the Story – Not Coming Out Right

Sometimes when I sit down to write something, especially blog entries, there is a thought that goes through my mind:

This is not going to come out right no matter how I write it.

This thought comes from me being a people-pleaser, or more like a people-appeaser, for far too many years. This extended into my writing and it’s taken me close to a decade to learn how to work through this and let go of it. Sometimes I get defiant and put in a piece, ‘If anyone reading this has a problem, then they can find their tits or balls and come talk to me about it.” So far, no one’s really taken me up on that. Why? I don’t know, and I really don’t need to know either.

So how do you handle this sometimes very persistent thought?

First, understand where it comes from and why it will always be there in some way, shape, or form. For me, it was learning why I was such a people-appeaser and dealing with the fact that it was pretty all for nothing. There was NO benefit to me in trying to appease people who could never articulate or clearly explain to me why they acted and talked to me the awful way they did. I know people who are never satisfied have to figure that out for themselves. Or as I put in a much cruder way, I’m not responsible for pulling someone’s head out of their ass for them, and neither is anyone else.

Second, you will never please, or be able to appease every single human being on this planet. Someone somewhere will always hate you for simply existing as yourself in some way. To my way of thinking, if you’re not causing harm to anyone physically, mentally, or emotionally, or causing physical harm to the places and things around you, you’re okay. If someone doesn’t agree with that, then you need to tell them to deal with that on their own and walk away.

Third, I believe as a writer you have to be honest with yourself, and in your work. Even if you write fiction, and say that it’s just from your imagination, I feel like you still have to be in touch with your emotions. I also believe sometimes you have to go to the places you fear the most, as the late author Anne Rice once said.

Now before I go any further, I want to make it as clear as I can that every writer has to find their own way of doing things, just like they have to find their own way of writing what they want to. There is NO one-size-fits-all formula to writing and there are no ‘rules’ that will get you kicked out of the writing club if you break them. Yes, people will have opinions about things and again, pardon the crudeness but when it comes to opinions I share my late father’s take on them when he said, “Opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one.”

I also want to say right here and now if a writer chooses not to be publicly linked to their work, like some romance authors have done over the years, I totally respect that decision as I believe everyone has a right to privacy.

For the longest time, I danced around the desire I had to put my own thoughts and feelings into my fiction. It’s a big reason my novel, ‘Not Enough Time’ has been in the works for twenty-two years (multiple drafts and multiple rejections, too) because the main female character, Laura, has a lot of my thoughts and feelings. I used to be afraid of getting called out on that, on being told I shouldn’t use my fiction as a form of therapy. That last bit is why I began to turn to non-fiction because I figured it was more acceptable to work out emotional shit that way. But now I’m not afraid to put my own thoughts and feelings into my fiction and if someone does have a problem with that, they need to deal with it, or not, because either way, it’s not going to stop me from writing what I want to write. And yes, I know I can write emotional fiction stories without turning them into lectures or therapy sessions.

When I came up with the idea of using writing as a form of therapy, I thought I would only publish the results all wrapped up nice and neat in a pretty cover. Then I realized I didn’t need to package everything so perfectly, and that even if I did gussy it up someone’s going to bitch about it sooner or later. And I honestly don’t think writing itself can burn bridges. Instead, I think I’ve just moved on and haven’t crossed back over a bridge that I don’t need to. I’m focused now more than ever on writing, and building the life I want to on the road. Most of all, I know there are always possibilities, and that maybe someday I’ll find my tribe.

There was an old saying among writers years ago that I haven’t heard a lot in recent years and it was, “Sometimes you have to slice open a vein and spill your blood out onto the page.” I’m not a believer in that extreme, but if you do feel the need to fully open up knowing full well the shit might hit the fan, do so. Trust me, you’ll survive and so will everyone else.

Stand or Fall – The Weaponization of Kindness

Many people have asked why this country has become so divided with very little middle ground that people can stand on. I’ve thought about this a lot and I have one big answer:

The weaponization of kindness.

Kindness can be used as a weapon against someone when another person comes at them saying their kindness towards others, their compassion and empathy, their belief in doing something good in life to help others, is wrong. It’s when kindness, compassion, and empathy are seen as weak. It’s when someone is trying so hard to be everything to everyone is repeatedly told that they’ll never be good enough for anyone, that no matter how much they do, it will never be enough. Most of all, it’s when someone is trying to live in a way that is kind, trying to be supportive and encouraging, and comforting, that instead of being treated like that in return, they’re rejected and told their feelings don’t matter at all and that no one wants to hear what they have to say.

It’s like when a child starts to cry, or says they’re sad or they’re scared, and instead of comforting the child or talking them through their feelings, an adult will yell and scream at them, tell them to stop crying or they’ll give them something to cry about. That’s not ‘toughening up’ a child, or making them strong and resilient. It’s teaching that child their thoughts and feelings don’t matter at all, and that no one really cares about them unless they’re silent and compliant with doing what they’re told and nothing more. It teaches a child to grow into an adult who builds a wall of silence around their thoughts and feelings, a child that grows into an adult who tries desperately to hide their true feelings about everything in their life. Worst of all, it makes a child turn into an adult who feels like they can’t do anything right because if they make one mistake, say one thing that someone vehemently disagrees with, then all the good that child and adult have done means nothing.

And yes, I’m talking about myself here but in the context of social and political issues for me it was growing up seeing the rise of right-wing conservativism, of evangelical Christianity turned inside-out into the complete opposite of the teachings of Jesus Christ himself. I watched all of this rise up fueled by a constant stream of hatred, fear-mongering, anger and rage, and worst of all, when kindness, compassion, and empathy were turned against people and were made to be ‘weak’, or ‘woke’ now in the twenty-first century vernacular.

As a child and a young adult, I learned history and saw that non-violence could change the world for the better. I learned how the first social safety nets in this country were created under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930’s to alleviate poverty and were continued on in the 1960’s under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. I grew up with stories of the American Dream- the house in a tree-lined suburb, a family able to live on income if they chose to, a vacation once a year, and a retirement plan. Then I watched all that almost completely destroyed simply because by the 1960’s, there were people who wanted that for all Americans, not just white-Angle-Saxon-heterosexual Christians, but for people of color and immigrants, women, and gays and lesbians. That’s when the shit hit the fan starting in the 1970’s and went full-speed in the 1980’s.

I have never been as open about my thoughts and feelings until the last few years after I broke my silence. I desperately wanted to be more involved in the world than I was and I wasn’t because I was scared shitless of being told I was a weak-ass piece of shit for caring about other people. I was afraid my bleeding-heart liberalism would be used against me to show how weak I was, how flaky I was, and that I could not handle any real responsibility. So I stayed quiet, took shit for that and took on all the responsibility I did but felt like shit for doing it.

I have asked myself why I think and feel the way I do about many things, and one big thing I asked myself was why did I feel like it was wrong to stand up for justice, for truth, to try and be compassionate and kind. I asked myself why I still believe in the good of this world even though I won’t blow sunshine up my ass or anyone else’s and have faith in the good in people. My answers always came back to not being wrong, or bad, or stupid for being kind, for wanting to live in a better world, and find a way to make that possible. I’m still learning and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.

If you have ever lashed out at a child or an adult for being sad or scared, if you have ever thought that pain and suffering was justified, and if you have, or even still feel that kindness, compassion, and empathy are weak, ask yourself why, and keep asking until you find all the answers. Break down the rigid conformist way of thinking and feeling, dissolve anger and hatred and instead think through the reasons behind that.

And remember this:

“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.” -Maya Angelou.