I wanted a place for all of my longer mastodon rants that I'm proud of.. Here it is. I'll be going through and adding stuff as time allows. Called it nightsongs. Because a friend once joked that it was no accident that my fursona is an owl because. I do my best work late at night. There is no grander vision no manifesto. You might get notes on the new Muffin Recipe, I'm developing, in addition to the mastodon rants
It is no secret, on this site at least that i have multiple serious disabilities. When i have to disclose that fact to outsiders i often get a strange reaction, they are taken aback by the level of "success". I have, apparently not many people in my position live in the "community" by themselves, occasionally, work a job, and enjoy strong bonds to people outside of intimidate family.
Let's take a pause to consider that. What outsiders (medical professionals, social workers, councilors, etc) consider a disabled person who manages to achieve basic human needs, not only a success but a success so great that i've been called an "inspiration" . I am not a success by my own criteria, yet. I don't feel that my life is particularly inspirational. Nonetheless I made a bet with the universe, that if one more person called me an inspiration or asked what my secret was. I would write it down. Turns out one really shouldn't make bets with the universe, especially not after dark. you will lose.
My "Secret" is that over time I've distilled my knowledge of how to human with a disability, into sayings that i repeat to myself, currently there are 12, maybe 14 depending on how you count. But i can't just say "Give the mouse her cookie" or "The universe loves you" without actually explaining in detail what those sayings mean, and pretty soon you have an outline for yet another book length writing project of approximately 20,000 words. See what i mean about bets with the universe. That's rule 11. By the way we'll get to that one later.
For now i want to address Saying 4
I have bipolar, which is at it's core a defect in how the brain processes and works with with certain chemicals primarily Dopamine. The media stereotypes would have you believe, we're all flighty maniac artist types with no self control whatsoever. But Mania is only one presentation of it. My baseline without medication is a severe depression that never completely goes away, even on good days.
When it first hit in college i spent weeks, only making it to class sporadically, and only really getting out of bed in order to eat. My GPA went from a 3.8 to a 1.7 over the course of two semesters. It took 7 years to get a diagnosis and another 18 months to find the right medications. Meanwhile i had to figure out how to not get booted from college and end up with a degree for my efforts. Thus was born my fourth saying. Give the mouse her cookie
If you give a mouse a cookie is a satirical childrens book, about a boy who gives a mouse a cookie, and then ends up saying yes to incresingly absurd requests from the mouse. That he would've never granted had the mouse asked up front. On those days that i was so depressed that i couldn't get out of bed, or in so much pain from the Cerbral Palsy that it felt like i couldn't. I found that starting with some small task, just to get moving would help. For example
On it goes, Even though my intent was to go stright back to bed, once meds were taken. By Giving the mouse her cookie. I ended up getting dressed and out of the house. Notice however that i didn't say to myself. "You have a lot of work to do.. It's time to get up". I set out one very simple very obtainable goal, and built from there. If I was feeling worse i could've taken my pills with water and had done with it. The key to this saying is that while doing the small you are always looking for the next larger thing.
Some readers might recognize paralells of this princpal in a saying in addiction recovery "Do the next right thing", or you might be singing that song from Frozen 2. This is an accurate paralell to draw, at least partially.
Do the Next Right Thing has a hidden value judgement within it however. And this value judgement proves to be it's undoing, in a disabilty/chronic health problems context. What is right and who decides. When we use such charged words as our focus we often set our eyes on unobtainable goals, even if the reason the thing you want is unobtainable due to a temporary circumstance. When we do not attain what we belive we should, this causes feelings of failure. Which is often the worst thing to have to process when you regularlly have doors slamed in your face; or have to watch your peers thrive whilst you struggle.
This is not to say "Don't have dreams" in fact Saying 8 "Dreams are like cows" is all about how long term goals work. Remove the value judgement and just do what inspires you to move. If all you end up doing with your day is listen to your favorite song on repeat, then at least you've made for yourself a little comfort and joy.
In the moment of pain, when our world caves in. Find the one thing that motivates you to action in the moment, and let action beget action. I find that if one does that. I find myself in a wider world, under better stars.
I just had to use GenAI to 'code something' because search sucks.. But that isn't the interesting part. See i spent like an hour polishing the turd it gave me... the original output had a lot of deprecated api usage, and php warnings in it.. Which under my current set up warnings are treated as errors because they output to stderr. Which Nginx doesn't like... Anyway. 45-60 minutes polishing, and it's still not very performant code.. I'll probably pound on it some tomorrow, add caching or something not the point.
AI, or the large dataset statistical modeling sort of "AI" that's currently being hyped will never replace human intellectual labor because in order to use the output it generates a human who knows what they're doing still must be involved somewhere in the pipeline.. When humans aren't the results can be subpar at best and disastrous at worst.
Is the "market" aware of this yet, i don't think so.. But AI seems more and more like a bubble waiting to burst the more i work with it//
I am not shocked that there are not warm lines for disabled people. But everytime i have to reach for one, and there isn't one. It makes me angry, and sad
For those not in the know a warm line, is a mental health resource, that with trained people that doesn't attempt to do rescues. Usually with call takers that have training/experience in the issues faced by a particular group. It's not 988. They will attempt rescue. They will transfer you into 988 and attempt to facilatate the best intervention, if your that bad
There is sort of an informal system, run through the Mastodon social network. and certain discord servers., But the election swamped it. And many of the best people on it, were occupied with there own crisis.
And how useful is that, If you have to utilize hard tech in a bad mental state.
I've been wondering where my activism needs to go in these times, this might be it
I can't wait for my Hiatus this year,not that i won't be working during it. I love all the various things i do. But I don't commit to projects, that are time intensive or have real deadlines during it.. and just take care of my own development as a writer/technologist/spiritual leader in training. Usually Runs Nov 15th through end of January, but it got bumped back a bit, this year starts on the 20th.