#random philosophy

I don't really care who any of you folks are. We are all humans (or have sentience like a stereotypical humans, any dragons or fairies here). I accept them all

There is a scene in The Hurt Locker that depicts a roadside (or more accurately a middle of the damn road) bomb. James uncovers an explosive device and begins to carefully disarm  it. Cue the discovery of several more all intertwined with the first.

This is what mental health work is. We brush away the top layers, searching for the wire. Once we find it there is the meticulous and terrifying process of disarming it as best we can. And sometimes, most of the time, we pull it carefully, oh so carefully away to discover it was actually in a nexus of wires, all of which need disarming and removal.

We want to light a fuse and watch it burn. We want to blow it to the sky and never see it again. We can’t. We’ll destroy everything beneath it if we do. Sure, that surface might not look important, might be somewhere we don’t want to be to begin with, but destruction leaves new problems in its wake.

The only option is to continue slow, meticulous, piecemeal removal of the fuses until it’s all as safe as it’s going to get. In the end, we have the space where the bombs were. It isn’t a complete recreation of what was there before the bomb was armed. It’s something new, different. Yet still a valid, valuable bit of real estate in our minds.

I was shoe-shopping with my man. This is not something that I usually enjoy. I can actually be rather homey. I even stopped counting the number of weekends I have spent in bed playing video games.

But here we were, shopping for shoes in all the stores you could possibly think of. At some point, I finally found something that I did not hate, or maybe I just wanted to end the whole torture. but my boyfriend had only been starting on his shopping spree, telling me I could find better, cheaper, somewhere else. I decided to buy the shoes, but it wasn’t just enough. I had to overthink the whole situation.

“When you get into a relationship, do you suddenly stop and go see if someone fits you better? Or cheaper? Do you usually want to go see if there is another guy who could be less exhausting?”

The boyfriend is not even remotely interested in abstract conversations. He simply said, “You cannot compare life, or love, with shoes”.

The conversation stopped there but I wanted to go further. I would like to think that there are some laws in this world, that it is not just chaos and randomness. That rules could be applied in a wide range of situations. It would make me feel safer in a way. But then I realised, I wasn’t looking for a conversation, I just wanted to feel safe.

I think when people say they want to be famous, they’re confusing it with something else.  For the longest time, I thought I wanted to be famous (and I guess I still do, to a degree), but it was only recently that I realized that it wasn’t so much that I wanted to be famous, but that I wanted to be appreciated.  I wanted people to acknowledge me, and attest to that I had value in this world.  Why that was is a whole other story for another day.

When you’re famous, the hard truth is that people don’t appreciate you.  They just appreciate the entertainment you bring them; and when that is no longer available, they leave you to go find some new fun.  When they can only see you on a screen, your lack of physical presence leads them to literally perceive you as a one dimension in every aspect.  It dehumanizes and depersonalizes you to them - they view you as a portrait, not the model for it.  You’re just a tool for their pleasure (kinda like pornography, but we’ll get to that on another day).

How can one say someone is a "non-believer" when they do in fact believe in many things?