#MightyPoets

I am technically a published cartoonist. It doesn’t count because I wasn’t paid. Nevertheless, I published a cartoon in the newspaper covering the military base I was stationed at. This has led me to conclude that I am more successful at something for which I have little talent (art) while failing massively at the only thing I have ever been competent at (writing.) Aesop may have written the fables, but I was the guy he was staring at when he wrote them down.

#Disability #Depression #PTSD #Trauma #MentalHealth #Suicide #MightyPoets

I was in an interpretation of the mobile home I lived in as a small child, in the bedroom my brothers used. All the cats and dogs were there, but my time with them was interrupted by a muffled knock at the front door. The Sheriff was standing outside the door, which was a chain link gate, and he opened it over my objections, allowing the dogs and cats to roam the neighborhood in violation of the law. The Sheriff blamed me for this, as children working on his behalf attempted to capture them. He looked like Gene Hackman, dressed in the khakis the Orange County, California Sheriff’s Department uses. Gene Hackman or no, I wasn’t going to stand for this, so I went back to my bedroom to retrieve my shotgun, wading through a kitchen that was overgrown with brambles and stung by insects as I went. The thought that I needed to mow my kitchen didn’t seem strange in the slightest, and then the dream transitioned to something that I forgot upon waking.

#Disability #Depression #Suicide #Trauma #PTSD #MentalHealth #MightyPoets

Drifting through the past

Unable to let go, we

Become our own ghosts.

#Disability #Depression #Suicide #PTSD #Trauma #MentalHealth #MightyPoets

Some time ago, I read that every twenty degree increment by which an electric motor overheats cuts its life in half. Overheating by forty degrees, for example, drops its life to one quarter of its life expectancy under appropriate running conditions. The overheated motor might seem “strong” as it pushes through, but there is a price. Bullying affects people in the same way. They might seem “strong” pushing through it, but something is lost, too. “A stranger is a friend you haven’t met yet,” will never ring true for me, because I was bullied. “A stranger is a potential threat until they reveal themselves as an actual threat” is my mantra. A crowd of people isn’t a community to me, but a hateful mob, and I must be vigilant in case they notice me. Some people are fond of saying that the bullies did me a favor by making me “strong.” I say they made a community weaker by destroying my capacity to participate in it. That capacity lay in tissues that bullying nipped away until the scars of dozens of half-lives covered them. Those tissues are dead.

#Disability #Depression #PTSD #Trauma #Suicide #MightyPoets #MentalHealth

Recently, I characterized myself as a hermit that people might seek out for advice. The characterization was satirical. No one who knows me in my offline life respects me enough to think that I would have a worthwhile perspective on anything. Online, I don’t know if people seek out my writing. When I consider that question, I think of The Simpsons Halloween episode that found Homer being tortured in Hell by the Ironic Punishments Division. A machine crammed “all the donuts in the world!” down Homer’s gullet. I imagine my writings being crammed into people’s feeds by a similar demonic machine. My writings don’t need to be sought out. They are just there. If readers find value in them, that is good, but are they so invaluable that they are worth seeking out, virtual mountains be damned? All I can do is recall a pair of poems I wrote for my cat. She passed away in February. I had sent both poems to my Emotional Support Canadian and was scrolling back through the conversation in search of something else and found the second poem. I started sobbing as I read it. I doubt anyone else who read it had that reaction. The truth is that my writing will never affect others as powerfully as it affects me. This is a frustrating reality for someone who started writing in hope of being understood. The only thing to do is learn from Norse mythology. The gods cannot stave off the end, but they fight, knowing that what they do will never be enough. Failure becomes more humane when you did all you could and nothing could have stopped what was coming.

#Disability #Depression #Suicide #Trauma #PTSD #MentalHealth #MightyPoets

I am afraid that I found stories of celebrities slowly going insane from isolation during COVID rather amusing, as what they were experiencing is what my life is all the time. Sometimes I imagine myself as the sort of hermit who lives atop a mountain. When people seek me out for my wisdom, I slug them with a tree branch and send them tumbling down the slope. It is a harsh lesson: there probably is a way to navigate the difficulties of meaning and interpersonal relationships in modern life, but seeking such advice from a misanthropic loner who escaped from humanity for the sake of his mental health is not the wisest plan.

#Disability #Depression #Suicide #PTSD #Trauma #MentalHealth #MightyPoets

There was a post asking what courses you would take if your condition was a college major. I can't find the post now. but I like the idea. Patient Advocacy 101: Introduction to Suicide Hotlines. The only time I called a hotline, I was terribly confused when they tried to talk me out of it. Art Therapy 304: Turning Patient Complaint Letters into Cartoons. When a patient advocate sees my cartoons, they instantly know what my major malfunction is, and since they can't unsee it, they can't claim they don't. Humanities 406: Connecting with Other Survivors Through Humor. Fear and loneliness cannot exist in the same space as laughter. Bonus Course Psych 101: Coping with Rejection and Failure When Your Attempts at Humor are Misunderstood. Happens a lot. Often the root of my desire to give up.

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I don't write in my books out of fear that I will say something stupid, and there it will be, mocking me forever.

#Disability #Suicide #Depression #PTSD #MentalHealth #Trauma #MightyPoets

I dreamed someone dressed in a military flight suit was standing on my porch in the middle of the night. Their were too many hoses hanging from his helmet, and that gave the presence a Chthulu Mythos feel. The scene woke me up.

Then I was seated in front of an elaborate model train/diorama layout. It had high school reunion vibes and the diorama took up about as much space as a reunion requires. (I never attended or was invited to mine, so I have no real world experience with such things.) I was cutting grooves into the head of a drafting t-square to store an assortment of dividers and other instruments. (In real life, such a thing would be stupid, because the instruments would all have to be removed to use the t-square. Why not just make appropriate storage to begin with.) A girl I went to high school with was seated next to me and handed me an object that was something between a child's puzzle block and a lock. The girl's younger sister came over and I held the object up before she could ask if I had seen it. She took it back, and the girls' mother came over and told the older sister that she would need an object of her own (a dowry) to win herself a real man. Then I woke up.

#Disability #Suicide #Depression #PTSD #Trauma #MentalHealth #MightyPoets

Visible means caught

I do not want to be seen

Give me the One Ring

When my beacon gleams

Visible means violence

Hide my awful sheen

Stash me in the cracks

Dividing the noticed and

Leave me inbetween

Please understand me

"I see you ," frightening me;

Visible, I bleed.

#Disability #Depression #Trauma #PTSD #MentalHealth #Suicide #MightyPoets