Vivat Libertas

It's Mental Health Awareness Week and I'm angry. I'm pretty vocal about being mentally ill, both online and in my personal life. I'm vocal because I believe I shouldn't have to lie about my health to be accepted in mainstream society. And amazing communities dedicated to fighting stigma and educating the public have helped me tremendously in my recovery. So I feel pretty terrible for saying it's not enough, but it really isn't. Our NHS is being gutted. People aren't getting the care they need. A&E departments, mental health wards and just about every service you can think of are being shut down around the country. A GP cannot attend to the needs of a mental health patient in a 10-minute appointment. Even the wait times for counselling are six weeks. Six weeks to someone with severe depression are an eternity. If someone needs therapy, they might wait almost two years with no mental health care at all. And if someone needs a bed on a psychiatr...

I am becoming disillusioned with the notion of solidarity. Oh, I'm not becoming disillusioned with solidarity as a good thing - I'm becoming disillusioned with people's attitudes to solidarity. You might think that I'm just one of those cranks who needs to complain about something because I don't have a job - actually, a lot of people do. You might think that I'm making things up, or maybe that I've completely misunderstood the notion of solidarity. Who knows? You could be right; for me, solidarity has always been a bit of a fuzzy concept as I learnt its meaning from context and from being in solidarity with others, not from a dictionary or from reading weighty tomes. As far as I understand it, solidarity involves supporting people through their struggles thanks to having responsibilities or interests in common, and dictionary.com seems to support me on this one . It takes some empathy, some kind of conscience and about 5 minutes of your time - so I thou...

I do wonder about whether it is possible to be happy sometimes; in fairness, I wonder about it much less than I used to, before I knew that I could actually be happy. (Even so, stick me in the middle of a despairing episode, one where I have trouble speaking or walking, and I'll still moan about whether I'll actually recover from it, despite clearly having done so in the past. Emotions are far too powerful for their own good.) These days, having actually been happy, I generally don't think about it as much - until someone else, someone in despair, brings it up. This really is just the hand-wringing of the privileged and disgustingly aloof, but what the hell can I do for them? What can I tell them that isn't an outright lie? It doesn't get better, after all. You don't get happiness on a silver platter - if ever. Nobody's got one overarching answer to finding happiness, and anyone who says otherwise is lying or being stupid. That's not really something t...

I really can't help myself. Though I'm wildly idealistic about half the time, I really can't stand glurge  or so-called inspirational messages. I'm really just too cranky for that kind of thing, especially today for some reason. I know some people like Sarah Kay's work. I personally, ignorant little thing that I am, hadn't heard of it until today, but "If I should have a daughter..." didn't really make a good impression on me. It's here if you want to take a squiz: So yeah, it reminds me far too much of all these "words of wisdom" which may be words, but certainly aren't wise, or accurate, or really anything good in this world. And in the interests of snark, saving what's left of my sanity and unleashing my creative juices upon the universe, I came up with some annoying, patronising and hilariously bad "advice" - though given that this is my rather odd and quirky style, there ar...

A big part of all this activism and freedom-fighting is hopelessness, strangely enough. On the one hand, you have the righteous and upstanding pillars of society (read: sheeple) claiming that "protest never changes anything" ( I debunked this a couple of days ago ), and on the other hand you have the ones who fight the good fight...well, they don't give up, but at some point every activist is going to sigh and wonder why they got themselves into this in the first place, why they waste their time trying to convince people who will never listen of a cause which many think is little more than a pipe dream. If you're an activist and that hasn't happened to you yet, it will. I want to concentrate on the second manifestation of hopelessness today, since I've dealt a little with the first one already. I'm no blithe optimist, no ignorant idealist, and I don't believe flat-out denying problems makes them go away. I know how hard it is to convince people; I kn...

No, this isn't the Catullus poem, beautiful as that is. This is actually about the struggle between idealism and cynicism, told mainly from the idealist point of view. I am very, very idealistic. Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit that - after all, idealists always walk around with their head in the clouds, don't they? Aren't they childish with their refusal to accept the harsh realities of life and their unrelenting stubbornness? An important part of being an adult is laying aside childish dreams; perhaps ideals are just another one of those. Besides, when have idealists ever gotten anything done? The world doesn't work that way. It will never  work that way, because people are too stupid and cruel to make it work, because following your conscience would bring economic ruin, because idealists are somewhere between crazy and batshit insane... ...I'm not ashamed to admit it, strangely enough, since the only people who have ever gotten anything done have been t...

For the sharp-eyed among you: yes, I did more or less steal the title from TV Tropes. It's a more concise way of saying "the world's a steaming pile of crap, but there's still hope". Did what I just said sound like a contradiction? Allow me to explain and let off steam. In this world...(insert dramatic pause here) there are a couple of camps of people. Some hold that the world is pretty much sunshine and rainbows and if we clap our hands a magical unicorn will come down from the sky and make it all better. Others hold that the world is depressing/mean/otherwise completely fucked and there's nothing we can do about it, except maybe slitting our wrists and writing shitty poetry, or throwing money at the aid movement of the week. And of course, there are the people that just don't care. I say they're all wrong. I myself belong to a camp of people who basically say "fuck you, the world is crap but we can make it better" - or a world half full. ...