sincere, but also, cheesy af

I was feeling pretty rough this morning, emotionally. YouTube decided to bait me with some cornball music. “this will find you when the time is right”, cute friend group of anime girls lighting sparklers as the background image. It was the kind of nostalgic sounding piano music that will launch the waterworks 100% of the time when I feel a certain sadness. I think I would have clocked it was AI quicker if I didn’t get double stomach punched with the channel name: dannyg

There are such things as coincidences, she yells at her mind futilely. Those ones are the worst, though. Is dannyg a common name? Yes. Is that kind of content popular on YouTube? Also yes. The “synchronicity” in this case is entirely in the subjective. A feeling that is somehow both uncanny and comforting. Meaningful or not, it did at least inspire this reflection. I didn’t edit out the pauses this time, but hopefully I don’t sound too spacey —

I decided to cut the first half of the recording I reference in the memo above, since I covered most of mental health stuff – this is the second half, about my frustration with philosophic conversations.

finally, this is the video of a simulation of schizophrenia I mentioned as well. I hope you watch as much of it as you are comfortably able, if not for me, than for general understanding and empathy.

edit: i fight myself everyday with this blog. The nastier voices tell me no one wants to hear your sob story – the echos of a world where causing any inconvenience or discomfort to someone else was a sin you’d never be forgiven for. But it’s videos like these that quiet those voices. They have no answer to the fact that hearing other people’s experiences, and the insights they’ve come to over time, has been profoundly healing. And that insight COULDN’T come from myself, because of the nature of the trauma. The shame, the blame. But we take the superpower we gained – empathy on steroids. We feel that other person’s story so deeply, before the toxic voices realize what is happening – we see that their story is ours. The compassion and grief we feel for that person cannot help but extend to our own mirrored experience. How could I look at a video like this, and say to Sean all the vicious, cruel, degrading things I let my inner critics say to me. It’s absurd, in the light of day. And so I continue to write, to speak. I leave it where it can be found, trusting those that need it will find it. But as I said in that Memo above, I cannot tolerate an opinion that opposes logical evidence. Shameful silence and masking is not longer tenable.