🇺🇸Thomas Paine 🇺🇲

“I miss feeling productive. I miss feeling spontaneous…I miss not being exhausted constantly. I miss feeling like I had a future… I’m trying hard to find my identity again. I have lost so much…after I worked so hard to become who I was.” buff.ly/3XmeL40 #ChronicIllness

One of the most difficult things to deal with when a narcissist (human predator) targets you, is the loss of confidence. Predators annihilate a person’s sense of self. Often, a person hardly knows themselves any more. Gone is the joy, the certainty, the anticipation of life. 😔💔

The rage is the part recovery doesn't prepare you for. Not sadness. Rage. Rage that you lost time. That they took your job, your health, your safety. That they faced nothing. That people participated or stayed silent. The rage doesn't resolve. You just learn to live with it.

Some people aren't sorry for what they did, they're uncomfortable that you now know who they really are. They don't regret the betrayal; they just dislike the exposure.

when you enter the corporate world and realize school bullying was nothing compared to dealing with unhappy, insecure, and unkind adults in their 30s and 40s who got job titles, positions of authority, and the power to make your everyday work life miserable.

Have you carried enough?

We have a pretty good idea of what trauma looks like and we know there's no one way to endure it. We have studies from soldiers returning from war. We treat their inability to talk about it, or their "unexpected" behavior as stoicism, not proof that they were not traumatized.

Scientific data does show a notable, population-wide shift in human behavior and personality traits following the pandemic. Here are two prominent studies for your review, plus the Pew Research Center Study, thrown in for extra measure. 1. The FSU College of Medicine "Pandemic Personality" Study The Findings: The study found statistically significant population-wide declines in Agreeableness (the capacity for empathy, trust, sympathy, and cooperation) and Extraversion (sociability and the desire to seek out others' company) by 2021/2022. The shifts were so severe that researchers stated the population experienced the equivalent of a decade of normal personality alteration compressed into just two years. Younger adults were hit hardest, showing sharp increases in neuroticism paired with a steep drop in overall friendliness and compliance with social norms. 2. The College Student Cognitive Empathy Study. The Study: Published in the Journal of American College Health (2022), this longitudinal study tracked college students' psychological well-being and empathic capacity immediately before and during the pandemic phases. The Findings: The researchers observed a significant decline in cognitive empathy (the psychological capacity to take another person's perspective or understand their mental and emotional state). This degradation of perspective-taking directly mirrors the "colder" and more "detached" behavior observed in the general public, as individuals became structurally less capable of processing or caring about the experiences of those around them while battling their own chronic stress and isolation. The Pew Research Center also reveals that 47% of American adults explicitly report that public human behavior became significantly ruder and more aggressive since the onset of the pandemic.

This is perfectly true, but bourgeois society functions on the principle of selective abuse and selective consequences. Punishing abuse can actually be a pretext for extending systematic abuse and intensifying abuses like enforced poverty and exploitation and forestalling change.

It's waiting for its own beauty

Making public martyrs of people who want to be public martyrs is as dumb as it is wrong. At every level

Survivors working their trauma recovery have had to think about more philosophy, more psychology, & more physiology than most normies will in a lifetime-- & that can create a conversational disconnect that can feel awkward & surreal. Caterpillars don't speak butterfly.

2016 brought a drastic increase in SA against girls in school, which has only continued to rise since, as girls' mental health deteriorated & suicidal ideation rose. Fuentes' "your body, my choice" became a chant at schools towards girls. Yet all we hear about is male loneliness.

You moved clean in dirty situations. That’s called integrity.

THE SHADOW HAS BEEN DANCING THE WHOLE TIME Duty can sit very still while the soul refuses to. The hands keep the familiar work. The hidden self has already stood up. What looks composed on the outside may be carrying a life that wants movement, color, and a freer music. Do not shame the part that dances where no one is supposed to look. That is often the truest self, the one that was never allowed the floor. The quiet task and the wild longing are not enemies. They are the same life asking to be joined. Let the hidden motion be heard. Play the note. Then give the braver self a real room, not only a wall. Awakening is not leaving the instrument. It is letting the dance that has been happening in secret finally have a body. ✨🙌🏿💫

We rail against people who deliberately hunt and kill large animals, yet say nothing about the vast majority of us whose daily actions indirectly lead to loss of habitat and increased pollution contributing to the slaughter of whole communities of animals.