Welcome to Gaia! ::

So you think you've got problems. You think you need someone to talk to or the burden will just crush you. Well, this is for you, little broken-winged dove.

This first post will be the link post. Not because it'll contain a bunch of links, but because it will link together some of the aspects of the larger picture I'm going to explain to you.

I do not have ADHD. These are not random thoughts spewed for the sake of perpetuating a myth. These are calmly calculated pieces of information strung together because they are directly related.

You won't find links to too many external sites here. That's not what this is about.

My intention is not to discourage or dishearten those of you with real, legitimate problems. I am deeply sorry for what you have to endure and can only hope the resources are available to you to help in whatever way possible. I do not, however, have those resources. You still need to find them for yourself.

This is also not for those of us who are just here to relax. I know you're out there. I can only hope this will, to some degree, ease our lives by getting some s**t off our shoulders that doesn't need to be there.

This post is for the piss-ants with fake problems. You know who you are. If you indignantly refuse to be accused of perpetuating fake problems, ******** off. You are dilluting public awareness of these very real problems, contributing to a state of jaded disinterest at the societal level that helps nobody. Depression is real. Those who really suffer from it do not deserve to be made the butts of the bullshit jokes you are creating.

Misery loves company.

Depression is an extremely communicable disease. And, yes, it can be just as destructive and fatal as HIV, AIDS, the ebola virus and various biological warfare agents. Combined.

So you think you're depressed. For whatever reason. Then do something about it.

You don't want AIDS, so you wear a condom. The same principle applies for depression, except you have to create your own emotional and intellectual condom. You can't buy one. Nobody else can create one for you. The responsibility has to be yours, or you aren't being very responsible at all. You're putting all your loved ones and friends at risk of being infected. You don't want to do that, do you?

You are not a snowflake.

The burdens you think you have are nothing more than baggage you can put down at any time. You just have to decide to put it down before you get hooked on self-proclaimed "corrective chemicals."

No, your baggage is not unique. Ally McBeal once explained that her problems were so much more important than anyone else's because they were hers.

That's bullshit.

Your problems are a symptom of trends and manipulation, both psychological and physical, subtle and obvious.

Your choice of attitudes about it rules how much or little you will be affected by it all. The key concept, though, is that it is your choice.

If you're already on anti-psychotics, anti-depressants and/or other such ******** chemicals, it's probably too late to take the choice lightly. You'll only end up dead. There are ways off such chemicals, but it's not my place to tell you those. You'll have to do your own work for that, so don't go running around telling anyone I told you to just go off your meds. I'm absolutely not saying that. If you're already on that kind of med, you better keep taking them or you could well become a danger to the people around you, and then you're just better off chained to a cold stone slab.

People get paid for this s**t.

But we don't.

People get paid ridiculous amounts of money to help you with your s**t. You may feel like they're getting paid too much for the little work they're doing, but you'd be wrong.

After doing for so many years what they do for free, I can tell you right ******** now there is no amount of money in the world that's worth holding your ******** hand like that. Get over yourself.

The myth is that psychiatrists and psychologists and other such "therapists" are supposed to "fix" you. They're not. They may want to and I know you really, really want them to, but they're legally and emotionally required not to try.

You are the one who is supposed to be doing the work.

Only you can fix you.

Nobody's going to show up in your life and save you from you.

And, yes, I know I'm repeating myself, but I have to make this perfectly clear:

Despite rumours to the contrary, you are the problem.

I agree whole-heartedly that there are innumerable external influences that are shaping who you are every day. Yes, there are. I know this. I'm as affected by them as anyone else.

However, it is your choice how these influences affect you. You, alone, have all the power to recognize and manipulate and change and fix how you react to the world.

The world is not responsible for changing itself to suit you. You are only one of several billion people on a planet that is only one small part of one equally small part of several trillions of solar systems.

You are not special.

You are sitting here on Gaia, one member of a supposedly "vast" on-line "community," reading what I've typed. The sooner you realize there is nothing special about you--despite what your fan clubs may say--the sooner you'll be able to set about making that change.

People may tell you you're special. They may dote on you, lavish all manner of compliments on you.

But consider the setting.

People come here because they are unable to find something vital in the real world. We are all intrinsically broken in some way.

So, sure, you may be special among the broken.

But what honour is that? What glory is there in being an inch above mud?

Wouldn't you rather be among the clouds?

This is not a peek. This is a ditch.

Zen.

We all know what "zen" is supposed to mean. But we also "know" that "life is supposed to be complicated and hard and a whole lot of work."

It's all about perspective. If you don't think life is a burden, life will not be a burden for you.

You pay way too much attention to the many media telling you that you're not worth anything until you pile s**t onto you; posessions, a "career," a family, kids, pets, a car, a mortgage, credit cards, a bigger c**k, bigger breasts.

And yet, at the same time, we know damned well that the happiest people in the world don't have credit cards and aren't drop-dead sexy.

They're also not on anti-psychotics.

Stream-line your life. Excise everything but the most important things; your health and your happiness.

Drop everything that doesn't contribute to these two things; the people, places, things and ideas that bring you down. A person is not a friend if all they ever do is dump their depression on you. A place gives you nothing if you can't think of it and just honestly smile [not a wry smile, not a smirk, not a sneer, not a snicker; just a ******** smile, at its most basic, contented essence]. An object you won't care about two months from now is not an object you must posess. Any idea that doesn't add to your ability to attain happiness and health is irrelevant.

I'm not going to do your work for you and make a checklist of every little piece of your life and tell you whether or not to get rid of it. I'm just going to use Gaia as an example because it's convenient.

Gaia.

What do you do on Gaia?

Got a lot of "friends" you chat at on here?

Spend a lot of time bitching in the Site Feedback forum about people making "stupid" suggestions or ask "stupid" questions?

How much time a day do you spend on here?

Isn't there something else you could be doing that would be more beneficial for you?

I don't care what your parents think of Gaia. Chances are, you don't either.

But are you really here because you think the time you spend here is worth something to you?

Do you think your time here is of benefit to anyone other than yourself?

Or do you just come here because you think you've got issues and it "helps" to tell people about them?

I'm not insensitive to your needs. I know where you're coming from. I've been there too. But, really, ******** off. I put the work in. I made the choice to not be a whiny, needy little ******** doing nothing but using everyone around me all the time.

So now I have another choice I need to make frequently: To be among the used, or to stand my ground and hold onto my piece of life.

Yeah, I can be pretty damned rough if you come to me and tell me all about your problems. It may just be that I can see the problems behind your problems more clearly than you can. I've had experience.

I don't care if you believe me. That's none of my concern. I don't need to prove myself to you and it's nothing but selfish and arrogant bullshit for you to consider demanding that I do. It's your responsibility to take what I say how you want. I'm not responsible for making that choice for you.

If any of this makes sense to you, that's great. If it doesn't, ask yourself if it's to anyone's benefit to argue. Chances are, I've already considered your point of view and still came to these conclusions. This is a symptom of my choices.

The meat of what I'm saying here is that you had better make your own decisions because neither Mahayr or myself can make them for you.

So stop ******** asking us to.

We are not your parents. We are not responsible for you. Your life is a product of your choices, not anyone else's.

So stand up, take some pride in who you are and who you want to be, and make s**t happen.

Stop waiting for anyone to hold your hand.

Stop crying and whining and writing sap-a** garbage poetry and dumping all your s**t on anyone else.

I'm not saying to "internalize" it, either. If you realize what you're "bottling up" is nothing at all of any importance whatsoever, suddenly you won't have anything to "bottle up".

"Bottling up" your s**t implies that you're hanging onto it. You don't need to. Just ******** let it go. So your b***h whore slut loser of a boyfriend left you. So ******** what? If he's such an a**, why the ******** should it matter? You haven't lost a damned thing. Stop dwelling on it and get on with your life.

All you do by going around bitching about it is putting burdens on everyone around you that they don't need. If they care anything about you, your "problem" will become their "problem."

I've already asked if you really want that, but it's something of a rhetorical question. You're not supposed to tell me the answer. You're supposed to tell yourself. I already know my answer.

I don't care about your ideas on the matter.

If what I'm saying here makes any kind of difference in how you think and feel, I'll be happy. If not, why should I care? I'm not doing this for you. I'm doing this to fend you off so I can have some respite from all you ******** dumping your useless garbage on Mahayr and me.

Don't get over it.

I'm not telling you to "deal with it" or "get over it" or "move on." I'm telling you to realize that what you're doing is perpetuating a number of diseases that none of us needs. Once you make this realization, you need to make the choice to change.

There are no unrelated details. There is no foundation, no top. No up or down. Your problems are not a vertical pile of blocks sitting on a foundation on ground. That image of your life will lead you only to wrong conclusions about how to make the changes you need to make.

The reality is far more abstract. If you simplify it, you won't see it; you'll see the equivalent of a fax.

Since there is no foundation on which the little details of all your problems are sitting, there is no one "core problem" for you to pull out that will fix everything. Your problems don't "stem" from one big, traumatic memory you're suppressing. Nor are your problems vast puzzles that you can't fathom the ultimate complexity of.

The solution to any problem that has not already been cemented into place by chemical dependency that has ******** your brain beyond any easy repair is a choice.

I'm repeating myself a whole lot. I know.

I'm vainly attempting to make up for all the bullshit you've been told all your life about this stuff.

You are abolutely confused and there's nothing I can do about it. Only you can. But you have to realize how confused and misinformed you've been. Then you have to go out and inform yourself. ******** what anyone tries to tell you. ******** what I'm saying. Make up your own God damned mind.

Don't ask me to explain more than I have here. If you don't understand any piece of text in this thread, you're missing a piece of information that I can't give you. You have to go out into the world, get the ******** off Gaia, and learn something. Right now, you're a clueless little idiot. So go out and get a clue.

Do the work. Take the steps. You get no satisfaction from watching someone else scale Everest; you only get anything from doing it yourself.

Supplemental information to follow, linked to throughout this post, wherever I felt extra information on any particular point would be appropriate.

I may or may not list sources. This is information I've come across throughout my life, not just within the past few minutes. I may or may not remember where the information came from.

Take it or leave it.

I don't expect you to believe me. I don't care if you do. But if you expect to talk either to Mahayr or me about your problems expecting advice, we are--from now, on--going to refer you to this thread. We've both taken on enough of your problems to last us a lifetime.

Now that I've put way too much thought and effort into writing this for your a**, do us all the favour of kindly ******** off with your s**t.

Do you?

No, you don't. Of course you don't.

If you do, go away. That's a bullshit attitude to have and you know it.

How many times have you heard of people wanting to kill themselves so they can "stop hurting everyone else"?

How many of those have obviously had someone whose heart would break?

Seems to me, the stereotype's so common, it's practically a joke. In fact, it already is a joke to a lot of people.

"But nobody understands me!" you may cry.

So stop writing dark, crap-a** poetry about cutting yourself and say what you mean, you back-asswords little puke!

"But I don't know what I mean!" you may cry.

How the ******** anyone supposed to understand you if you don't know how to express yourself?!

You won't learn how to express yourself by listening to garbage music. You won't learn who you are by reading garbage "vampyre" novellas.

Go outside, breathe some air, see a sunrise, kick a ball. Stop trying to be the "deep" littlle ******** in a corner, all alone, because Neil Gaiman "speaks to you." I can guarantee you are completely misreading his intentions.

Physical manipulation.

It's really hard to peg this down, but when you look at a slice of cold meat in the light and see that little rainbow of colours moving across it, you know you're looking at it.

That's the subtle sign of "preservatives."

No matter how benign anyone may say these may be, their purpose is to inhibit chemical reactions. Except we consume food exactly for the chemical reactions that sustain our lives.

Eat enough of these preservatives and there's going to be at least a small amount sitting in your system, ******** with the natural functioning of your body. Who knows how each preservative ******** with you? Studies don't exist that examine the century-long effects of chemicals. All we know about are things that have impacts within a decade.

If you get cancer fifty years later, how can you know where it came from?

We're playing with chemicals that we don't really understand. We may or may not know what they do in the short term, but not the long. So it's better to cut down on things we haven't already been consuming for thousands of years.

I know most areas of the States don't have any kind of real good food available, which is why everyone's so damned fat and disgusting.

Or is good food not available because nobody would buy it?

Start demanding it, buying it, maybe it'll be available and we'll see more vegetable farms and less tobaco farms. Even McDonald's can be manipulated into offering better choices. Make the same demands of your grocery store and buy good food in bulk. Your local bulk stores [Sam's Club, Costco] tend to have fantastic food at fantastic prices.

Drop cold meats and anything with heavy preservatives: Stop eating junk food altogether. Coffee, for Christ's sake! Get rid of it!

These are all things that make you grotesque physically. When you feel bad, you'll think bad and your shitty attitude's just going to affect everyone else.

It becomes a cycle of pissed off assholes pumped up on caffeine and Burger King, cutting each other off, flipping fingers, blowing horns and decapitating each other.

Stop stuffing your face with chemical waste and maybe you'll stop being human waste.

I don't have to tell you what's bad for you. We all know what's bad. Yet we all eat it anyway.

Do the work! Take the steps!