27 January 2016

Suicide is painless?





You are right - 100% correct - FUCK THIS POST
I think about suicide everyday - have since I was a child I'm 46 now. Call me me selfish, tell me I romanticize it but realize you don't know me and have NEVER walked in my shoes. Molested by a cousin and his friend as a child and then "man-handled" by a peer with developmental disabilities but not mentally disabled. Bullied by "family" and Bipolar - a litany of meds that don't work or only for a brief time. On disability and judged by family, friends and strangers because ... you look/act well enough to work but we conveniently forget you end up on a Psych Ward at least once a year and who could forget the SIX MONTHS you spent in the mental hopital(a chorus of "I do, I do") Where are the understanding people who are casting judgement when it's been 1 week, 2 weeks , a month since you showered because it's so hard to get out of bed. Feeling sorry for the people I leave behind that's a laugh. Unless you tried to understand, unless you were really there - dealing with the crap in your own life and making time for me and my problems. DO NOT THROW YOUR GUILT TRIP AT ME because I did not ask for this and I do not need your pity and most definitely I do not need any more baggage.
So FUCK YOU and FUCK THIS POST.
PS - This is the SHORT version.


The above was my response to the original post.
Below is my response to a friend who posted this and apologized for upsetting me.


I have a few suicides in my family and so I have seen the guts(is that the right word?) it takes as well as what people call the selfishness. I have seen that post before and today it just set me off(difficult night) I understand where you were coming from with that and after viewing the page I get(I think) where most people are at when it comes to mental illness in general. Perhaps the internet is the new mental hospital - bringing people together in their pain, trying to understand each other but there is no real human contact so I think it's more difficult to not judge.

When I was 17 I  self-committed to a mental hospital. I can tell you one thing about leaving high school that February - it was the hardest decision I ever made but it was the most right. I spent 4 months there and was surrounded by people ranging in age of 10 to 80. It was actually very nice - really good food(I put on 20#), school/classes and lots of therapy. Out of all the children/teens there most had made at least one attempt and some were constant cutters/self harmers but none romanticized it. It was just the idea that the pain would be gone(self harm is different it is about feeling but also wanting the pain to go - strange dichotomy). We were all so different but the pain being gone was our common thread. It is not just the adult who struggles with mental illness on a daily basis it is most especially the child, the teen. It is just for some of us the pain does't dissipate and society sees the adult with mental illness as a "real" issue because their parents aren't there to care for them anymore - society must pick up the slack.

I talk/write a lot but I want you(people) to understand that this is most definitely not a choice. I can't imagine anyone wanting this life - whether it be better or worse than mine. Again I thank you for your compassion, empathy and true attempts at understanding and I value your friendship - it is frustrating living in such a repressed environment - but long distance friendships on FB with like/open minded people do help.

26 January 2016

my last piece of art


This is a box 6" x 6"
2004







19 January 2016

Republican Values

How can anyone in good conscience say they support Republican values? 
They have destroyed education, decimated voting rights, insist that Americans are not "entitled" to social programs, safety nets and a living wage, poisoned our communities and marginalized whole groups of citizens. 
Corporations, banks and the 1% (a status that the majority of Republicans will never attain but believe they will) dominate the playing field and destroy the lives of the rest of America. They care only to increase their wealth on the backs of the common worker with no cares as to the welfare, happiness or success of their fellow man.
Compassion is not a word that most Republicans are familiar with. Fear and anger at those who are "different" do not let Red State voters see that they themselves are in need of compassion. They would rather vote against their own best interests than try to give another or themselves a leg up.The fact that they have in the past and continue now in the present to deny many of our nations citizens their inalienable rights because of skin color, religion, nationality, sexuality or gender while using their "christian values" to hide behind the 1st Amendment is contemptible.

Our children wallow in the willful ignorance of educational policies that substitute religious belief for science and cut out large swathes of our country's history to make some feel  "comfortable". It does nothing but dumb down our future generations and not allow us to compete on the global stage. We look foolish as Climate Change, age of the Earth, Evolution and basic science are denied for religious conviction. We are contradicting history so that we don't look at the genocide of Native Americans, the exclusion, removal, and detention of Japanese-Americans and the real cause behind the Civil War - slavery not state's rights. (perhaps it's the state's right to enslave?)


Americans should be appalled at the chips and outright chunks taken from the Voting Rights Act. It is 2016 and the GOP are still trying to disenfranchise voters. If you are black, poor, elderly - hell ANY minority they are doing their best to stop you from voting. Changing the voting locations, early voting shortened or gone, primary dates changed, mandatory voter id's that are difficult and expensive to get and disgusting gerrymandering. Black and white died for the RIGHT of ALL Americans to vote and the subtle and not so subtle attempts belie an underbelly of hate in this country.  


Republicans say that our veterans are important but want to reduce their benefits. They legislate against the poor and the middle class at every turn. Privatization of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, reduction of Food Stamps, defunding of Planned Parenthood, attempting to refuse the right to collect unemployment, denying a living wage with the excuse that it will destroy businesses. 


Conservatives have no problem loosening regulations that are in place to protect citizens from reckless corporations who only care about the money they make. Look no further than Love Canal in Niagara Falls, NY or currently Flint, MI. Money is everything. People are nothing. The health and well-being of our nations citizens are inconsequential. There is always time for clean-up after lives have been irreparably destroyed. 


If you are not a white straight conservative southern Baptist male you will have problems as well. Your next best chance is being a white woman with those same attributes but even then you will be legislated against - sometimes with your own help. As a woman you do not deserve equal pay and if you are a minority it will be even less so. 

When we enact laws as to who someone can love and marry I feel we cut too close to the bone. Love is love when it is between consenting adults - no matter your race, your sexuality or religion. That there is no problem with our straight (religiously inclined) leaders marrying multiple times after cheating on spouses who are terminally ill is astounding.
As a woman the right to decide your own medical care, in the most personal circumstances, is not yours in many states. A woman's health concerns are between her and her doctor not her and the state or federal legislature or some ridiculous zealots who should focus on their own lives instead of intruding where they do not belong.
If you believe in no-belief or a different god you are looked upon as an undesirable. 
Religion and state should not mix - our founding fathers worked it that way for a reason.
No one has the authority to pass moral judgement on another. Their own holy book instructs them to "Judge not, that ye be not judged" and yet they cherry-pick that as well. Doing for themselves while short changing those who are not like them


6 months, a year even 2 years into a Trump or Cruz Presidency hope all the supporters of these Republican contenders remember how they voted. When the promises of these silver tongued candidates have fallen by the wayside and the people are struggling and wondering how it got so bad will they see the folly of their beliefs? I expect they will be back to blaming Obama and the liberals and the "others" for their problems - as one of the main values of the Republicans is to never take responsibility for their own actions