In my drafts folder, there are half a dozen versions of this post.
Every time I start it, I stop.
Why?
Because I’m self-censoring.
Why?
Because I’m afraid.
Why?
Because very early in my life, I discovered that when I say what I think, and it isn’t what the “popular” kids think, I’m going to spend a lot of Saturday nights watching tv with my parents.
So why am I writing it now?
Because everyone I admire is brave.
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I want to be the picture of equanimity, the soul of superior judgment. I want to be seen as someone who rises above the static of “sides” and recognizes the similarities of opposites.
However, I also accept G.K. Chesterton’s axiom that “the purpose of having an open mind is to close it on something solid.” And for me that includes deciding what’s under the turtles:
I have extremely high trait-openness, and am sometimes tripped up by my willingness to inhabit a worldview for the purposes of testing it, even when I can see that it is not being proffered in good faith.
I’ll play the “pretend you are Socrates” game to the point of absurdity, leading my loved ones to suspect I’m bonkers at times.
So in my very first Substack post, I experimented with the idea that there is no objective truth, and defended that position in arguments.
And what I ultimately concluded is that there might not be, but we have to agree on a certain number of turtles below which there is a solid surface, or we cannot function as a society, and that this is part of what being in a common culture means.
The anecdotes and evidence get harder and harder to hide (good thing they have the magic power of redaction!) that we’ve witnessed an appalling, and intentional, abuse of trust across the full depth and breadth of the pharma-medico-regulatory complex, leading to death and disability on a scale we may never fully grasp.
It is hard not to think of the people in my life who demanded that I take a cardio-toxic injection to be in their presence or perform rituals of humiliation to atone for my sin of refusal (if you’ve never had a family member leap backwards when you approached them, it is valuable experience for understanding how it is that the fear of ostracization can lead people to stay silent in the face of, or even participate in, very ugly things).
To quote The Bad Cat, “medical intervention is always, and everywhere, a cost benefit analysis,” and I don’t fault people for making those decisions for themselves in the face of the propaganda onslaught, but to assert the right to make them for me, yeah, I do.
How many of them knew, or cared, about my risk of cardiac injury? How many of them knew, or care, what my risk benefit analysis was?
As I’ve written before, that wasn’t their job. I wasn’t promised.
Nonetheless, underneath all of my turtles are certain principles, one of which is: don’t let fear drive you into a madness of believing that other people have to warp themselves around the loom of your neuroticism in order to be allowed in your world.
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Fear is fear. Most of us experience it, and it’s not something that can be objectively measured or compared, so I am not concerned with whether one fear is more “valid” than another.
What I AM concerned with is whether someone makes their fear my problem.
It’s not the fact that the shot could have killed me, and yet people who purport to care about me were telling me to take it (rather than telling me, as they should have been, to run, not walk, in the opposite direction from experimental therapies, given my health history).
It’s the fact that somehow it has become okay, societally, to make such a demand on others at all, and to demand to know whether they had done so.
Privacy for me but not for thee.
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Until I publish this post, I am out of integrity, because I believe it to be true, and fear holds me back from sharing it.
When people come to me in pain, when they aren’t sleeping, when they are anxious, when they are depressed, in every single case there is something they know they need to do that they are afraid of.
I don’t see it as my job to make you do that thing, but I do see it as my job to help you understand how your pain is pointing to it, and to help you navigate the process of moving towards it.
The world feels scary to me right now, I’m not going to lie to you. But I also feel like I have a secret, because the tools I have to get myself through what’s coming aren’t based in fear, and they aren’t based in fighting, and they aren’t based in suppressing anything.
They are based in the knowledge that what the body and mind are saying is exactly what I need to hear to find my way forward.
Want to get started? Here’s a download that might help.
I feel better already.
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Well done.
So grateful for your vulnerability & integrity!