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[secretkingdomjellyfish]

who are we?

A few nights ago I was reflecting on the world, the way things are and the way things appear to be going. I’ve watched as the two extremes throw a lot of insults around and there is a particular one upmanship going around that’s difficult to ignore. I stated in my last blog that both sides are continually trying to throw shit the other way to distract from what they, themselves are doing and I tried to work out why?

I mean, the answer is pretty simple really. We are no longer able to have healthy debates about the rights and wrongs of our actions and we are slowly devolving back into a sort of tribal mindset, acting like toddlers who would rather throw the ol’ ad hominem attacks rather than actually have to think about the valid point someone may have made.

The internet is full of echo chambers where people’s views are not being challenged (right or wrong) and are simply being strenghened by others around them. They are narrowing their view point so much that they are now refusing to even hear any, even slightly different, view point and because they are being pushed along and cheered by the many internet strangers who share this view, it’s easy to get very caught up and commit horrendous crimes in the name of what they feel is right. I pity people with this mindset because it’s so incredibly cloying and restrictive. By allowing yourself to be open to others viewpoints means that you can and will grow as a person. I know I sound preachy as fuck but try it. Just give it a go on something small, something insignificant.

The mob mentality, confirmation bias and mental regression are all massive problems right now. We see society falling apart around us and rather than admitting that we may be playing a part in this, we simply blame the ‘other side’. It’s their fault, I done nothing wrong, but did you see what they did?! See, my internet friend whom I’ve never met but have found completely agrees with my shaky world view agrees with me so I must be right.

Currently I’m watching the events of the world with a mix of horror, humour and sense of unreality. We have an ongoing pandemic which is still killing people, it hasn’t just decided to stop and, personally, I feel this is mother nature’s way of firing off her warning shot before unleashing a real horror that will wipe out humanity. I’m watching several countries use this pandemic as a screen in which they can continue committing atrocities without the world watching them and we are so busy fighting with each other we don’t see that insidious danger slowly creeping in and getting ready to move when the time is right.

We are currently pulling down statues of various international figures around the world. Many of whom were involved in various neferious activities which we don’t like to talk about. Now, this is, in it’s very basic form, a noble and understandable thing to do. Why should we celebrate the lives of known slave traders, dictators and generally unpleasant people, right? No one wants to talk about the fact that history is always written and rewritten by the victors. We all want to believe that the people who won these wars and battles were absolute angels and didn’t commit any serious crimes themselves. Time has a bad habit of smoothing the very sharp edges of history. Making it smooth and pretty to look at - we tend to forget that war makes monsters of even the kindest of men if given enough motivation. Furthermore, these very activities that we find so abhorrent now was perfectly normal at the time and we are constantly trying to place the views we have now (with several hundred years to ‘evolve’) on the past - something that is always going to end in disappointment.

The thing is this (now bear with me with this) led me to think about the events that led to WW2 and, to be fair, several other massive wars that no-one really talks about and the rise of dictators in general and I do see similiarities to the events that led up to both world wars but in particular WW2.

Scapegoats? Check. A strong ‘nationalistic’ movement? Check. Disinfranchised and exhausted population who are sick of their current situation? Check. Low level of racism that has always been present but has stuck to the shadows because it was socially unacceptable (and rightly so) to display any kind of racist tendancies? Double and triple check.

Something else to think about. We all like to think that once we defeated Hitler that we defeated his horrendous regime. But, and here’s the big point, there were many MANY people who shared his view and actively committed atrocious crimes thinking they were right.

These people didn’t just decide that their viewpoint was wrong when Hitler was defeated and, like when you stomp on a mummy spider, they scattered all around the world much like the little baby spiders scatter when you squish their mummy. These people didn’t just change, they went into hiding, worked in the shadows, spreading their regime and finding each other - creating networks.

All we are seeing now is those people (well their kids and grandkids) finally coming out of hiding because their leaders are telling them that the viewpoint they have held all their lives is now right and it’s the time to act. They never went away, they just hid in the shadows.

At times of crisis, we look to our leaders for the right way to act and we like to think we are fairly evolved and socialised but we are only really one maybe two paychecks from complete anarchy and it’s happening right in front of our eyes.

We are also great at just ignoring what we don’t like to see because if I close my eyes and stick my fingers in my ears, it will go away...eventually. We are great at avoiding unpleasant or uncomfortable truths and if we can lie to ourselves, how easy is it to lie to others? The current leaders are openly telling their countries that racism is absolutely ok, that it’s ok to only care about yourself because that’s how they got there and they are SUPER successful. They are telling their nations hat narcissism is cool - it’s totally ok to love yourself. A lot. The uncomfortable truth is that it’s always been there, we just pretended like it wasn’t and simply swept all that shit under the world’s carpet hoping that if we ignored it for long enough, it would just go away.

It’s now highlighted a massive problem within our societies. We ARE broken but no one wants to admit this and even less so do we want to attempt to fix it because that would take hard work and admitting that we went in the wrong direction somewhere along the way to creating our mighty empires. We haven’t really evolved much past the 15th century when the kings and queens ruled with an iron fist and the odd bit of torture to keep things spicy.

Now, as a society, we aren’t very good at self regulating our behaviour. We generally need the fear of punishment if we do wrong. Whether that’s being thrown in jail, fined or ostracised from the group we call family, it doesn’t matter, we will tend to toe the line if we are scared of being punished for bad behaviour.

However, what we deem as bad behaviour is up to our leaders and the society we live in. We also need to believe that the people who are meant to uphold these laws are infallible. that they are capable of self regulating but I want you to look back on the first sentence of that paragraph. Humans really aren’t very good at it and here lies the problem. This is the lie we tell ourselves to help us sleep at night but the lie is simple; that our leaders are looking out for us and not themselves and their own little tribes.

Now I can already imagine several of you shifting in your chair uncomfortably and others dreaming of rebellions and bloody revolutions. Standing on a pile of bodies with your tits hanging out, the wind in your hair as you hold your tattered flag proudly but it doesn’t have to be this way at all.

and this brings us on to democracy. I can hear people screaming that democracy works. I mean, we get a say in who looks after us, who makes our laws, who ensures these laws are upheld. That works on paper but no one accounts for how complex society really is. We live in a fast world where everything is pretty much instant. Instant coffee, instagram, instant meals. We are now so incapable of concentrating for more than five seconds without being bored and we are absolutely BOMBARDED by continually impossible standards via TV, internet and radio. Buy this and you too can look fifty years younger.

We worship superficial beauty and treat people who are ‘naturally’ beautiful like Gods and Godesses and then wonder why they mutilate themselves in order to continue looking young when that worship starts to fade. It’s like a drug and we become hooked on that worship.

We are a throwaway society - we throw away everything, including the very same celebrities who we worshipped five minutes before and, unfortunately here is where the problem lies.

We want continualy entertainment. We can’t stand being bored - we want the next big meme, gif or fad to take us away from the misery that is the day to day living. We don’t want to believe that we are being duped by the very leaders that WE placed there. That we were wrong in our choices because they promised the impossible - a simple fix to an incredibly complex and difficult problem. There is no easy fix for this and there, unfortunately, may be an entire collapse before we finally admit there is a problem rather than continually doubling down on the choice we secretly know is wrong.

Democracy and (here’s a really naughty word) socialism can and does work if done properly, however, misinformation is the biggest problem right now and as the very people who are leading us got there through misinformation, why the hell are they going to tackle that problem? As a society we really need to do a bit of soul searching - admitting the faults and the crimes committed against various groups and accepting it happened. This isn’t going to go away and if we don’t at least attempt to try and make amends, it will eventually blow up.

I can only hope I’m wrong and that we start waking up before it’s too late...

[secretkingdomjellyfish]

Another day, another penny...

Here we are again. Life has become even harder with COVID doing the rounds and offing every poor sod and his granny. I actually thought I had already witnessed or experienced the worst of what humanity had to offer but no, life and society continued to surprise me. From the hypocritical ‘clap for our carers’ movement (The same people who clapped where the same people in the supermarket the next day sneezing on your eyeballs - two meter rule, people!!) to our world leaders and celebrities telling the world ‘we are all in it together’ whilst they lounged in their 20 room mansions. It was all a bit...shallow. Every month is like opening the world’s shittiest advent calender only rather than getting a nice little piece of chocolate behind each window, we get some new unseen horror unleashed on us.

Then came the BLM riots. Another black man was killed by corrupt cops who gave absolutely zero fucks about him or anyone else. People were, entirely and justifiably, angry and the protests began but then something else happened. I had already seen this phenomenon slowly creeping it’s way in with COVID making the rounds but I just put it down to me being bitter and angry at life, therefore my perception of people (I had already set the bar WAAAAAY low) was skewed.

I saw people take advantage of an entire society’s grief. I saw the vultures circle to loot and hate or to share their idiologies of hate and pain and recruit more angry, tired teenagers to do their twisted bidding.

I saw both extremes of the coin take advantage of the situation to spread that same hate and lash out at the other side. ‘Don’t look at us, look at what the other side are doing!’ I heard them cry. ‘The people protesting are just violent thugs, look at them causing all this damage, how else are the police meant to act?!’. ‘It’s not us, we are just so tired of the police taking advantage of us and I REALLY need these new Nikes’.

But then there were the people in the middle. The people who just wanted real change. The people who just wanted the hate, the pain and the injustice to stop. Those people marched and protested and wanted their voices heard. Who were seeing what I and many others were seeing and wanted to restore the balance. Unfortunately they were quickly drowned out by the screeching of the two extremes and it became a game of ‘who could sling the most mud to deflect from their own actions’.

To say I’m sickened is an understatement. I’m embarrassed and I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed to even call myself a human being. My heart is utterly breaking at how broken we really are, how much trauma has been ignored and how easily we are influenced by shiny, new things. How the media continually drives us, like the herd animals we are, to consume, to buy, to hate others that are different to us. To make us think that our little tribe, family, race are the best and everyone else is wrong.

Do me a favour. Find a story. Any major story and then go read/watch/listen to several different news outlets (on both sides of the coin - you know who they are) and see how they report it. I can assure you, it will be like watching a different story altogether. Don’t get me wrong, they all have the very basic facts but they simply cater to their audience. No wonder people think they are right, they are surrounded by others who think the same way. They feel a kinship in a really scary world. The leaders (not the real movements, not the real game changers) take with one had and point with the other.

Plato had it right with his cave anology. Those shadows that the people can see are just that. Shadows. Boogymen. Nothing more than smoke and mirrors. I get that the world is scary, I get that we don’t understand even a fraction of how the world works and I understand so SO well that it feels good to find others who think the same way as you and even if you ‘see the light’ and see the world for what it really is, there are few who will listen to you. Most of us took the blue pill because the truth is just too painful to bear.

However, a new pattern has emerged here. A much more dangerous way of thinking. We just don’t allow ourselves to be wrong, it physically hurts! Everything we do is so emotional today. Everyone just wants to think emotionally rather than taking all of three seconds to think about something logically and rationally.

Society is full of adult toddlers who have a tantrum when they are challenged. Rather than giving them our time, we should be giving them a sippy cup with chocolate milk and a nap. I get it, it feels bloody good to scream and be angry. To blame someone other than yourself or your leaders for the life you have lived. All those missed chances? Not your fault, not your parents or your leaders fault. It was those pesky (insert blameless minority here)

Now I can already hear many of you shouting ‘I hear you lamenting but I don’t hear you coming up with any answers’ but the solution is simple. The implementation is incredibly complex and difficult and (unfortunately I believe it is also impossible but I’m praying I’m wrong) will require everyone to do their part but the answer is so SO simple. Equality.

I don’t mean the bullshit ‘everyone should be treated the same’ that’s not equality. I’m saying EVERYONE should be given the same chances regardless of their race, gender, sexuality, sex, wealth. Instead, the world is incredibly unbalanced and unequal and I have strong feeling that mother nature is about to shift it back into balance because she is a bad bitch who is fed up with us just taking but not giving back.

In my teens I went through a phase (I can hear the sniggering in the back). I found wicca (I can now hear louder sniggering). Now this phase lasted about 6 months and generally involved me wearing a lot of black, buying some coloured candles and generally trying out some cool spells because I could now do motherfucking magic biatches! But, soon enough, it fissled out and I got bored and moved onto something else (mainly the grunge scene - they, just, like...got me, you know?). But, I took one of my very core beliefs away from it. As at the heart of this beautiful religion it was all about balance. Whatever you took, you had to give back and EVERYTHING came back threefold - you had pay the dammed ferryman (you always have to pay eventually and not always in the ways you expect) . So, you sent out good vibes? You got those good vibes magnified right back atcha! Kind of a witchy butterfly effect.

Furthermore (check me out with the academic phrasing..eh? eh?!) many of followers of Wicca believed that their main deity was simply like a multi faceted diamond with many faces and each aspect simply reflected a different religion, deity or belief system and that she was always with them no matter what deity they believed in. (disclaimer - It’s been a long time since I was involved in this so if I’m wrong, please accept my deepest and most sincere apologies) but, again, it kinda made sense to me at the time (and still does). When I first started, it was new, it was different and it gave me purpose but then the glamor kinda got scraped off and I actually had to do some hard work and, being a teenager, I was just not into that.

Now I know many of you are asking ‘what the hell has this got to do with the price of cheese’ but bear with me because the answer is, again, relatively simple.

It’s all about balance. We have taken but not given back for so long. As a society we think that being successful is hoarding as much wealth as possible, drinking champagne and eating caviar whenever we feel like it, occasionally giving a few quid to charity to show that ‘we’re in this together’ because that is what the media have us believe. That it’s the ULTIMATE goal to have your own private jet and generally just whittle your life away doing nothing but pamper yourself.

We think the only way to achieve this is to take it by force. To be ruthless and cutthroat and step on as many heads as we can to get to the top, right?! That’s always been the way it was done!

However, that might have worked for a while but, as a society we have kinda went full circle and are right back at the start - openly rejecting facts and evidence for emotion (well it feels better to believe in x therefore it must be x) and anecdotal evidence (if you crack an egg at the fulll moon whilst hopping on one foot, you will totally get rid of that cancer - it totally worked for a friend of a friend so it must be true).

Right now the world is a giant carnival game and we all know those carnival games are rigged as shit. Step right up, Steeeep right up! Come along, try your luck! Why you look like an amazingly (add appropriate adjective here) individual, I bet YOU could win - not like any of these other chumps. The whole thing is rigged in favour of the wealthy and powerful and, in all honesty, I completely understand. It’s in our very nature.

It’s been so insidiuous and we have been bombarded so much with this message that we now have an entire generation of very broken and exhausted individuals who think that surviving and living are the same thing. News flash. They’re not.

This is why we are in the situation we are in. We have simply been sleep walking and ignoring what is right in front of us. In order to move on, we need to accept some really hard truth and take a long, good look at who we are as both individuals and as a society. Honestly? I don’t think we are ready for that yet the other two options are to continue the way we are going and let mother nature do her thing or simply destroy ourselves in the process. We are quickly running out of options and I REALLY don’t want to be the guy who said ‘I told you so’.

Now before anyone starts with the whole ‘you’re so wrong because (insert appropriate defense here) just stop and think for three seconds. Let that knee jerk reaction go and give it time to sink in. Even read it again if you have the attention span to do so and then think. Is he really wrong? Maybe the truth just hurts.

TL;DR - society is really broken and there’s no easy fix.

#wtf #covid #blm #hardchoice #depression #anxiety #currentaffairs

[secretkingdomjellyfish]

A little bit dented but still good.

As I start writing, i’m aware that I sound like an edgy teenager who has just experienced their first heart break and is giving poetry a try. ‘oh I’m so broken and my soul is so dark’...’the wind howls within these empty walls’ blah blah. I get it, I know! Unfortunately my teenage years are long by me and now I’m just a sad, broken kid who is trying really hard to adult but failing miserably.

Life is already difficult for all but a select few (and even those guys only get to choose their misery) but life is a little more difficult when every day you wake up and all you can do is focus on not falling apart over the craziest things. Can’t tie your shoelace properly? Well that’s at least a half hour crying fit. Can’t find your keys? That’s a full rant about the injustice of the world and how shitty people really are. The tiniest molehills are mount f*cking Everest and everyone is expecting you to prance up it like those gravity defying mountain goats all the way to the top when you’re more like a three legged cow with a bad hangover.

I’m lucky (or unlucky depending on your viewpoint) in that I don’t have any little sprogs running around that I need to look after but I do have a very loving and very patient partner who continually keeps me going even when all I want to do is hide away and tell the universe to go take a giant flying f*ck to itself.

However, life must go on and if I want to eat tomorrow, I also must go on but working for a living can be and is incredibly difficult sometimes. Now before anyone gets their pretty little knickers in a twist and starts with the ‘well it’s work! Who actually likes going to work?!’. PTSD makes everything really tough, especially when the anxiety kicks in and I start to ruminate and re-examine every single detail of every single bloody conversation. What’s worse is that I know it’s stupid and I know that I’m overthinking it but there’s always that ‘what if’ that sits in the back of my skull stoking that anxiety fire. Even when I throw the odd bucket of water on him, it doesn’t matter, he just shakes himself like a wet dog and with a malevolent smirk throws a few extra logs onto that fire making my head go into overdrive. It eventually gets to the point where my anxiety goes so fast that it just becomes white noise and I go numb. 

That moment is a bit of a double edged sword as on one hand my head stops. The anxiety stops and I stop thinking about that pause between the letters O and K. On the other hand, I’m now so numb that I just kinda stop functioning. If I was an old x-box I would be displaying the red ring of death as my head reboots and I eventually start the whole process all over again. Usually over some insignificant comment about my bowl of cornflakes. 

This isn’t even considering the continual disassociation. Now this doesn’t sound like much of a problem - I mean, we all have unpleasant memories yeah? These memories basically force me into, what I call reboot mode. I just stare into the distance like a Scottish Lass staring into the distance as she sits upon the hill waiting for her lover to return from sea (nice bit of imaginary there, no? Well I’ve been watching a lot of ‘outlander’ recently so expect more). See the thing is with disassociation is that it doesn’t just polity knock on your door and ask to come in, oh no, these seriously spicy memories make themselves known by knocking down the backdoor of your brain and simply making themselves at home and playing that film whether you want to watch it or not. Does anyone remember the film ‘clockwork orange’ and the poor guy is forced to watch all of that violence and gore - his eyes being propped open by some horrendous machinery? Well that’s what it’s like; all whilst you’re trying to hold a conversation with someone or complete some mundane task.

These memories packed up all the emotions I felt associated with that memory and they are usually incredibly unpleasant - all out terror, anger, deep sadness and I relive them (It’s like the worlds shittiest sci fi holodeck). For someone watching me it’s like I go into a bit of a trance and it takes a lot o repeating my name to bring me back to reality. All sorts of things trigger it - a smell, a particular phrase, a noise, a face or even a situation that was similar to the memory and WHAM I’m back reliving the horrors that were my past. 

Now this entire entry just sounds like I’m some poor guy feeling sorry for himself and making excuses for his crappy existence or even some dude just ranting to the uncaring void of the internet but I actually find this strangely therapeutic. I know fine well no one is listening but by simply expressing how I feel, i get to imagine that there are other people out there like me, who experience the same shit and it makes me feel a little less alone for a while. The world is a lonely place after all.

[secretkingdomjellyfish]

Shitty mental health is shitty.

Depression sucks. Anxiety sucks. PTSD sucks. They really do. They slowly erode your soul until you’re nothing but a husk. I feel like any semblance of anything that makes me, me is simply slipping away and I’m powerless to stop it. I don’t even know who I am anymore. I don’t even recognise the things I do or say anymore. It’s like that old movie ‘invasion of the body snatchers’. I’m watching myself do and say things that aren’t me. I watch from inside my head screaming myself hoarse but ‘outside me’ never listens. I walk around in a fug, an automaton simply following the preset routines as I watch the world around me burn but it doesn’t matter because whatever made up me has gone on a long holiday in my head and there’s no return date.

Have you ever seen those videos of the poor kid on the roller coaster and they pass out because they are so scared? Only to wake up screaming because they are still on that terrifying ride? That’s what it’s like. I disappear because life gets too much and come back only to realise that shit has got worse and it’s so hard not to just disappear again. I feel like I’m drowning in an inch of water yet I can’t lift my head up because I’m exhausted.  I’m exhausted. I mean utterly and completely exhausted. I’m so tired of continually fighting my head, of having to think about every. single. little. detail. What did they mean by that? Who is that? I don’t recognise that phone number! They want to talk?! About what?! Are they angry at me? Go through every detail of the conversation. What did I say?! What did they say?! They paused, why did they pause? Is this it? What’s that noise? What’s that pain? I just screwed up again, I knew it! I’m pathetic.

It’s all so utterly exhausting and the worst of it is? It’s not just exhausting for me. I’m like a giant black hole that sucks in everyone around him where no light can escape and everything is always so dark. No matter how much they try and pull me out of this quick sand, I just wriggle in deeper and take them with me.

When it’s dark, I can’t see what’s right in front of me - I can’t see that giant exit sign and my mind fills in the gaps. There is no exit, no one will help me, I’m all alone. It fills it in with whatever crap it has and it ends up just filling it with the scum at the bottom of the barrel because I’ve have used up everything else. It doesn’t stop. It just keeps going and if I stop frantically treading water, I drown. It’s like a cancer, slowly eating me away until there’s nothing left.

It’s like groundhog day from hell. I can’t even escape into the land of nod as when I go to sleep I’m woken up by the continual nightmares until it’s time to get back up and do the whole thing again. There is no rest. To add a bit of variation, my mind sometimes won’t let me sleep because I will ruminate continually until I finally fall into a light doze, exhausted and frustrated and the minute I wake up? BAM. The anxiety is waiting for me with a baseball bat, ready to cripple me for the day ahead.

My mind is a dark place because my eyes are shut. I’m scared and I don’t want to face these demons anymore so I just close my eyes and I curl up into a little ball until they go away but they never do. They continue whispering all of the bad things I’ve ever done, they tell me I’m pathetic and worthless, they highlight every single mistake I’ve ever made. They hold me down and don’t let me get out of bed. It’s always the same never ending cycle and I’m so dammed tired.I want to know what I done to deserve this?  

I’m writing this to remind myself of this moment. I want to remind myself that things can only get better. That I won’t always feel so alone in a crowded room. That I’m loved. I need to keep moving because every time I stop, I start drowning again.