*muffled cursing from the next room*

Two things about our current frustrations: external circumstances and internal circumstances.

So many of us have been taught to measure our worth by our productivity under capitalism. But we are under late stage capitalism right now, full of shit like “lean staffing”, supply chain problems, depressed wages, the gig economy, and the constant grind of “hustling”. We have looming problems like the threat of homelessness, the threat of starvation, and the threat of literal death by plague. The economic caste system in place where other people judge how much basic human dignity we deserve based on things like race, religion, gender presentation, ability, political leaning, and wealth is also a drag on the human spirit. We were not built for these things, and they are not about us. We need to decouple these things from how we judge our merit and our worth.

Internal circumstances: most of us have weird mental/medical shit going on, either to ourselves or to our loved ones. We are all worried about that, even if just on a suppressed, unconscious level. We are in the middle of a global freaking pandemic that does not appear to be going away. We are worried about that, too. (Even the people who like to go maskless to prove how “not afraid” they are, are aware that they are risking death right now, and it weighs on the mind, making them shorter tempered and shittier to people. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.) There’s probably a lot of other stuff going on in our lives and minds that we might be trying not to consciously acknowledge, or else be swept away in a flood of overwhelming feelings and potentially panic attacks. Our minds are full of pit traps right now, and it is not conducive to living an efficient or high-performance life under capitalism, which makes us judge ourselves by the standards of our employability and our ability to not care about these stressors. We are literally being judged by our callousness as though it is a good thing right now, and I just want to point out how fucked that is from every direction.

I don’t blame any of you for trying to handle those big feelings in an over-functioning way, I do the same thing. But sometimes you can choose to voluntarily take a break from sanity to cry and hyperventilate and be held for a couple hours until your brain has gotten rid of some of the overwhelming feelings, before your body decides when to throw you a bigger panic attack on its own schedule, which is inconvenient, to say the least. When you pick the timing, you can go back to being a sane adult later, after the headache and crying hangover. It works,mostly? I have been taking occasional days to be not-okay and my mental health is way better for it. I recommend trying it at least once. If you do it, please make sure to have eaten recently, to drink water and get electrolytes before the crying. Make sure your family/partners know what’s going on and have the bandwidth to take care of you at that time, and plan ahead to make the transitions as smooth as possible. Then offer to do the same for them, because we’re all in this broken world together and the issues we have with that are larger than ourselves.

We have power to handle these things together, and to change the world, if slowly. There is hope of things not always being like this. Good luck.

So I used to be pagan, of the Wiccan variety, and in about 2006 I left my coven.

I left because nothing felt right, nothing felt effective, and I am one of those people who likes to write things down. That becomes a problem when you read tarot and go back over your readings later to see what was truthful and what was merely conjecture. And if you notice that you are doing less well than chance on your conjecture-to-truth ratio, it is really hard to believe your own bullshit. So I stopped reading tarot, and started looking at the other things I believed, to see what might be used as fertilizer. And pretty much everything I believed wound up in the compost heap.

Weirdly, I didn't miss it. I miss some of the people from those days, and the strong sense of community that we had as an actually-persecuted religious minority.

I don't miss believing in things, or trying to effect change using means that have been proven not to work. But once I was on the path of disbelieving, I started finding other things to believe in, like the inherent humanity of the people I live in this world with. And then I was on the path to finding policies and data that actually started making sense of the parts of the world that I had been labeling as nonsense and stupid. If you have to label a big section of the world "stupid nonsense" then you are probably missing something fundamental about that part of the world, possibly multiple somethings.

It never seemed a good use of my time to doubt everything I knew, when I was young. But I think I can be forgiven for that.