blog

so i started thinking about the idea of a manifesto. the statement of a strongly held belief, right. i've seen other people posting them on their blogs and thought that might be kind of neat, but i was at a loss for what my strongly held beliefs are, besides "we are living in a state of technofeudalism," "you are not the only person who matters," and "if you don't need it, get rid of it." i'm sure if i sat and thought about it for long enough i could come up with a list.

that's the point of this blog. i can iterate on previously published ideas.

and then i think about the revelations i have on a regular basis, how i feel as if i am finally starting to understand humanity and history and the way society works, and i wonder if i shared them if i would sound completely psychotic or if it would make sense to the reader. most people cling to the idea that there's a clear demarcation between the normal and the mentally ill, that sex and gender are the same and gender is immutable and everyone's brain is wired the exact same way, that nobody is ever different. we don't know how to handle differences where i'm from. anything heterogenous is suspicious.

"where i'm from." as if that isn't part of the human condition. as if we don't raise our children in environments where they never encounter anyone different from them. there are too many differences for one person. i don't blame kids for pointing when they seeing something aberrant to their worldview because they're small and stupid and don't know any better, but adults shouting about immigrants and trannies and the disabled -- freaks, yeah? -- like we're the problem. like everyone who isn't native isn't descended from immigrants, or colonizers, or both.

now i'm ranting about western politics, which the rest of the world is tired of hearing about. that has nothing to do with a manifesto, but it's hard to tease out my strongly held beliefs and publish them. a less-strongly held belief is that the average person is stupid and the internet was better when you had to use a monitor and a keyboard to use it. when you had to have some creativity and perseverance and reading comprehension. there's so much slop out there, and i feel myself getting stupider every time i read a blog post that was supposedly written by a human but it's riddled with AI tells. now i can't even trust that people aren't wearing smart glasses and constantly recording everything that happens with their phone cameras.

the Internet of Things terrifies me as a concept. do we really need washing machines to be connected to the cloud? or vacuum cleaners?

this is a topic i might come back to later, but i'm not a geopolitical expert. i didn't study history or economics or political science in college. i majored in psychology, and i barely graduated in four years. i used that degree to tend bar for eight years, and then i couldn't work anymore. the last decade i've been trying to make a life worth living that's divorced from capitalism and The State of Things. i think i've achieved that, for the most part.

but i've had to stay off the internet. i had to get off social media altogether, and to avoid places that have a social media mindset.

i'm starting to think i need to stay off bear blog, while i'm at it. it's too great a strain on my focus. too many people are talking about too many things that require meta-context, or that seem as if they're addressed to me when i'm not even a consideration for OP, and it reminds me of twitter back when it was called twitter. i'd imagine it's what bluesky is like, but i'm not on bluesky. maybe i should get on bluesky. i hear there are more cat pictures there.

UPDATE: during the course of writing this post, i decided to log out of bear blog and stop posting there. there's too much going on for me to keep track of, and i really feel more comfortable here. like i'm not trying to look for the freaks, they're all just here already.

for my own reference, here are some topics i would like to address in future posts:

• how ADHD, PMDD, schizophrenia, and transness overlap for me
• why i walked away from a career in publishing
• why it took me a decade and lots of psychotropic medication to come to terms with the fact that i'm disabled
• why i had to disappear in order to survive
• how it's possible to love my family and to never want to hear from them again
• how i used creative writing to survive multiple bouts of psychosis and depression
• why i'm learning interactive fiction and game programming instead of continuing to write novels and short stories

in the meantime... "muse" isn't going to finish itself. even if i never show it to another person, i need to get it into a playable state so i can forget about it. call it done and move on with my life.

how to talk about how i have managed to maintain a tenuous grasp on my sanity without telling war stories...

this website, for starters. i could make this website truly unhinged, make it into an expression of what it's like to have survived a condition that caused me to believe i was dead, that i must have died decades ago and been haunting my family all this time because i couldn't explain things like careless drivers and people regularly almost colliding with me in the supermarket. i lost my appetite. medical neglect. doctors not taking action when they should have. people not responding to me when i spoke.

i know i said i was going to lock down my op sec, but i think it's bullshit that i'm expecting myself to be silent about my lived experience, and i think it's bullshit that i'm embodied and taken seriously as a human being more as a man than i ever was when i was trying to present as female. forty years of my life, i tried to live as my sex assigned at birth. repression started when i was young, came from my parents and the media and my own undiagnosed adhd and pmdd, and i committed. it was procrastination, really. i kept putting it off for someone else to deal with. everything that happened when i was a kid, in my young adulthood, in my thirties even, all of that belongs behind an abstraction. it happened to someone else. that happened to [deadname].

it's a curse to have insight, sometimes. there's a reason why in bloodborne, the more insight you have, the more about the world you're able to understand, and the crazier your character gets. i've been on a lot of medication for a lot of years. i'm lucky. antipsychotics help with the delusional thinking and the paranoia. the two feed into each other. pattern recognition locked in overdrive makes me draw conclusions that other people can't see.

it scared my sister, when i had a psychotic episode in the spring. i don't think i've processed the effect it had on her yet. we didn't really talk about it when i was in the hospital, and i don't have a therapist. that's a topic for my private journal. nobody else needs to be privy to the fucked-up shit i've lived through. it's called secondary trauma for a reason. the internet is full of other people's trauma. i'm trying to keep mine somewhat squared away.

didn't mean to do it publicly, necessarily, but that's alright. maybe i can maintain my own sanity by having this website be a representation of how i'd like to think and not how i actually think.

UPDATE: right, i was saying. i have Ideas for how i could make this page into a canvas of what my thought process and worldview looks like, but i'm here to pull myself together, not take other people down with me.

of all the options i've considered, to include self-hosting, neocities feels like the safest place to be openly mentally ill, or openly trans, or openly anything. i have to be careful about what i openly post, but i think it is important that i practice sharing my writing with the internet, even if nobody ever reads it.

since nobody will ever read it, i have the opportunity to remain pseudonymous, and i'm going to take it.

i don't know who i'm addressing when i'm writing. i think i'm going to write to my future self. he's the one who's going to read all this shit.

since i am writing to myself, don't take anything you've read here as sage life or blogging advice if you happen to be wandering past it months or years later. in general, this is me:

i don't expect to update this site every day, but i would like to practice doing so with as few words as possible. if i'm going to post, it should be worth eating up space on the internet in 2026. there's so much noise, i feel like a seagull squawking at the beach when i'm posting alongside everyone else. sort of started touching on this in the last entry.

for me, the less i say, the less opportunity i have to stick my foot in my mouth. blogging with ADHD and everything else i have going on, i don't always have a filter between my thoughts and my words.

this is meant to be practice. so i'm practicing. a rough draft in vim, edit in vs code, boom, post. don't overthink it.