The occasionally original blog.

but in my experience 95% of my hallucinations are getting spooked by very clearly hearing someone knocking on my door or calling my name from another room or hearing footsteps walking behind me which are "just" my brain recreating the horror of an abusive childhood

(not trying to put you on blast specifically, you're just a good example to jump off of)

media and pop culture hypes up psychosis a lot as The Worst That Can Happen out of sanism, so even when you try and filter that cultural bias out you still assume it's based on something

when, no, psychosis is actually very simple: it's just hyperactive pattern matching. it's your brain's signal-to-noise ratio being off balance, it's seeing images in random static. it's not always this special uniquely big thing, it's in fact quite mundane a lot of the time.

no one is immune to psychosis, it's not purely the realm of the insane. anyone is one bad night of sleep or one bad case of food poisoning or one bad fever away from being just like me on my worst days.

I hadn't heard about this so I had to look it up and see what the fuck happened. And Christ, she was just 21 years old. Just 21. She graduated three years ago. She would have had her first legal beer just two weeks ago. And now she's fucking dead.

I'm not here to entertain the radfem bandwagon, so don't even start on that. My concern is that this more than likely had lead-up and warning signs that just... didn't get taken seriously. Bad interactions, comments, weird feelings. These two should never have been left alone together.

I'm just. Wow.

Just... wow.

I work in construction. Specifically the environmental and heritage mitigation stuff large infrastructure jobs need to do to get planing permission: where they send out ecologicists to document what ecological damage the project will do and how to mitigate it, or send out archaeological teams to dig the route of the project to record the archaeology for future genertions before its destroyed. And the staff of professional pre-consturction ecology and in particular archaeological are mostly women: about 50-50 for the ecals and more like 65-45 for the archaeologists, and we almost never have a problem with harassment or aggression from other trades, the other trades tend to like the archaeologists and ecologists (even when they cause delays) and find thier work facinating, and tend to treat the (mostly 20 something) archaeologists like thier kids, they were even suportive of our one transfem worker as the UKs stupid new bathroom laws came into effect (which is so, so dumb when its a site portaloo, literally legislating which one-person plastic bucket you can shit in), and there is almost never a problem... unless a woman was lone working.

20 archaeologists on site, 13 of them women, and 100 other tradesmen, no problem.. but if a single woman,or a single queer person or a single immigrant, was left alone with 6 of the other trades, that's when suddenly the creeps came out. We won't send archaeologists to monitor mechanical excavators on thier own any more, we send them in pairs and we say its so one can act as a banks-persom for the machine, under health and safety regs, and it is for their safety but its not the machine that's the real danger. It is fascinating and terrifying how quickly some men who act "weird but harmless" around a group of women or queer people or immigrants (and that's the demographic for professional archaeology and ecology in the uk) suddenly take the mask off and become utterly vicious the second its just them and one other person, and how the other men on site very seldom stop them because "they don't want to get involved" or "it was just a joke" right up untill it suddenly isn't.

Don't ignore your instincts, if you get a bad vibe from someone at work make it clear to your boss you won't work alone with them, raise it with a union or quit or asked to be moved to another location of need be, but don't ignore that instinct. Your job isn't worth you life.

Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”

Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”

Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”

Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”

State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”