Moving Forward-A List of Pros

Yes, sorry, I’m bad about actually blogging, that’s my B. I’m working on it, I promise. Also I didn’t intend to use this blog for personal things, but I haven’t written in forever so w/e.

Anyway, CN for depression, s**c*dal thoughts, exercise

I’m about to quit a job that has been exacerbating my depression and making me want to kill myself. I’ve been struggling the entire time, but the suicidality crept up in September and hasn’t fully gone away. I only started working there a year ago.

But today I filled out a formal resignation form, giving my two weeks’ notice. Also, my supervisor had the amazing idea of using up a big chunk of my annual (paid) leave for the second week, so I only actually have five more work days. Then a week-and-a-half vacation before I start my new job. (I’m going to do delivery driving for Jimmy John’s.)

Obviously this is exciting and awesome, and so I’m going to refrain from annoying my Facebook friends by putting a list here of all the things I’m looking forward to when I’m no longer employed by the USPS: Continue reading “Moving Forward-A List of Pros”

Moving Forward-A List of Pros
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Knowing Disabled People Changed My Mind About Ableist Slurs

CN: ableist slurs

This post is spurred by a recent post by my colleague Ania, which is a challenge to those of us within the community to stop using ableist language for one month. I recommend reading her post explaining why certain words are harmful to neurodivergent and disabled people and can perpetuate stigma against them.

Over the last few years, I’ve come to know many people who have disabilities, or identify themselves as disabled even if they don’t have official diagnoses. Ania herself has been a big part of my revelation on this topic. I have learned through exposure that terms which I used to use casually, like “retarded,” “stupid,” “lame,” and “blind” are subtly enforcing a culture which demonizes those traits. Continue reading “Knowing Disabled People Changed My Mind About Ableist Slurs”

Knowing Disabled People Changed My Mind About Ableist Slurs

Hey There, Internet!

Well hello there! Welcome to The Orbit, and a special hello to those of you visiting my blog in particular. ;]

For those of you who aren’t familiar with me [probably most people], allow me to introduce myself: I’m Luxander, a genderqueer trans dude, poly-pansexual flower, atheist, feminist, and YouTuber.

I started my blogging career on Blogger, as so many of us have, beginning some time in high school. That blog moved to WordPress at an unknown date. My semi-professional career started with Teen Skepchick back in 2012, followed by Queereka later that year. A couple of my pieces were crossposted to the main Skepchick blog during my tenure on that network. I stepped down from those positions due to depression in late 2013, and was invited by Zinnia Jones to co-blog with her at Freethought Blogs in early 2014.

Now, I get my own space on a super awesome network with some of the most spectacular people I could ever imagine calling my peers, colleagues, and friends! I feel so honored and privileged to be part of this project, and I hope you’re as excited about it as I am. Continue reading “Hey There, Internet!”

Hey There, Internet!

Messages I wish my mom had actually taught me

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Content notes for abuse, ableist slurs, misogynist slurs, beauty standards, drug use, mental illness

My mother considered herself a feminist. (She’s not dead, I just don’t talk to her any more and she might as well be.) She was also bipolar and had a difficult time communicating things in a way that made sense, even though she was intelligent and thoughtful about a lot of things.

Looking back on my childhood, I realize that there were messages she sort of tried to teach me, but didn’t effectively teach me at all. To me, it just looked like more things fitting into her patterns of erratic behavior, but now I understand why she behaved the way she did about me wanting to shave my legs and wear makeup, and why she didn’t mind walking around the house naked after a shower. A lot of my opinions were (unbeknownst to me) influenced by popular culture, so I looked down on her for some of it.

I first wanted to shave my legs and armpits when I was about 12. She stubbornly refused to let me for about a year, and I never just went and did it because she was abusive and generally I feared what would happen if I went against her directly, even if it had to do with my own body. All she ever said was that I was “too young” and that I “didn’t need to” shave my legs. It was never articulated, but now I think I understand her reasoning. Continue reading “Messages I wish my mom had actually taught me”

Messages I wish my mom had actually taught me

A New Way to Battle Depression

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Normally, I’d reserve this type of post for my personal blog, but I figured if I’m feeling inclined to write, I might as well put it in a place where it might be useful to someone. My friend JT Eberhard convinced me that my way of thinking might help someone else put to words how they feel, and moreover this is actually an awesome idea for fighting mental illness and it might literally help someone with their brain weirdness. So, forgive the somewhat personal nature of the post.

Being depressed is about more than just emotions and moods. Yes, that’s a big part of depression: feeling bad all the time for no apparent reason, having disproportionate emotional responses, having a hard time enjoying things, etc. One of the most impactful struggles, however, is that your brain creates logical loopholes and selectively discards relevant information. It cripples your ability to think on a perfectly rational level.

Depression ebbs and flows for me, so some days I think more clearly than others. I take an ADD medication which helps immensely. I’ve also noticed that Ambien has an interesting effect on me. Ambien is a sleep medication that I take pretty regularly. If I don’t actually attempt to sleep within about a half hour of taking it, I find myself incredibly motivated to create things, organize my life, clean my apartment, and begin planning and working toward various goals. As you can imagine, this sometimes leads me to stay up even later, but I digress… Continue reading “A New Way to Battle Depression”

A New Way to Battle Depression

How Depression Is Like Back Pain

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As a person with depression, I’m always thinking of new ways to describe it. Partially so that people who don’t experience it can understand what it’s like, and in the hope that these perspectives will help me treat it like a legitimate problem instead of beating myself up over feeling bad “for no reason.” It’s becoming common to relate it to physical illnesses like cancer and strep throat. Here’s a good one: chronic back pain.

(I don’t experience any severe chronic pain, so if I’m completely off the mark with any of this, feel free to correct me.)

Someone with intense back pain might have difficulty getting out of bed. They probably could get out of bed, even if in pain, but most people wouldn’t expect someone to push through that kind of agony unless there were pressing matters to attend to.

Some people with intense pain can’t even bring themselves to go to work every day (or at all, in some cases).

If they do go to work, they might be tired and/or sore enough to be unable to do dishes, laundry, or other house work when they get home.

Chronic pain comes and goes, and sometimes it’s more debilitating than others. One day might be bearable and the next day, even going to sit at the computer is a task of unimaginable difficulty.

It seems as though, by and large, these things are accepted and the person experiencing the pain is not shamed for not being up to the tasks before them. Unfortunately, some people do experience invalidation from others, especially if the pain is not the direct result of an injury. Then, it’s “just in their head.” Which is pretty much the attitude toward depression and other forms of mental illness.

The thing about depression is that it is painful at times. Emotional agony is just as real as physical pain. At the end of the day, it’s all just brain signals, and most people have a pretty firm knowledge of what feels good and what feels bad, whether skin sensations or states of mind.

Depression, like chronic pain, can go for periods of time in “remission,” can pop up for a couple days at a time or months on end, and can be triggered by other things. Someone with back pain might twinge something while lifting a heavy object and be stuck in bed for several days. Meanwhile, someone with depression might have a particularly stressful day at work or a heated argument with a friend or partner, thus cascading them toward depression even if they were feeling okay beforehand.

They’re both unpredictable. They’re both painful. And they’re both real. Invisible illnesses deserve as much respect as cancer or Ebola. (Though you can leave the panic at home.) Nobody should face stigma just because they’re sick.

How Depression Is Like Back Pain

Religiosity Still ≠ Mental Illness

Sometimes it’s easier to talk than to write, so I did some talking in a video.

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People within the atheist movement have a nasty tendency to refer to the behavior of the religious as “crazy” and “delusional.” Unfortunately, some people with respectable platforms willingly and knowingly propagate this type of misinformation and vehemently refuse to use more correct (NOT ableist) terminology. My first video on this subject was not exceedingly well-articulated, so I decided to tackle the issue again.

And I also decided to go ahead and transcribe it for you, in case I’m unclear or if you just don’t like watching videos for some reason!

Me: Hello, Internet people!

I decided to finally make a video following up the one where I was talking about religious fundamentalism and mental illness, and why they’re not the same thing and why you shouldn’t treat them as the same thing.

I want to start this off with a PSA: If you don’t have a mental illness and if you aren’t a professional within the field of psychology or some very closely related field, you should not be making statements about whether or not something is crazy or whether something is delusional or whether somebody is afflicted by a mental illness. Because there’s no way for you to know that and you’re not a professional and you should not be making judgment statements based on things that you’re clearly not very well informed about.

So, in my last video, I was really talking about choice–that’s the kind of big difference, for me, between being a religious person and being a person with a mental illness–is that you choose to engage in religious activities and not in having a mental illness. I do agree somewhat with some of the comments on that: that that’s a little bit of an oversimplification of the issue.

There are parts of the world where you don’t really have a choice about whether or not you adhere to a religion because you can be put to death or put in jail for having those beliefs [or not], but in the United States pretty much the biggest ramification is: social outcast. You can lose members of your family, which is a big enough ramification for some people and a big enough consequence that they don’t do it–they don’t defect from their religion at all, they don’t name it when they have doubts. That’s a legitimate concern and it’s unfortunate, but doesn’t really take away from the fact that the internet now exists and you can have access to information aside from what you were taught.

It’s also been pointed out to me that if you’re indoctrinated as a child, you have significantly less opportunity to branch out and change the way that you think because of the fact that your psychology is so malleable when you’re a child. You can be changed enough that you’re not capable of making a choice to get away from your religion later on in life.

Some people also pointed out that being exposed to this as a child can cause you to develop mental illness (I think somebody said). Which I would grant to an extent, because like I said, when you’re a child you’re very malleable and if you’re being engaged in any kind of brainwashy-cultish sort of stuff (some religion, Christianity, sort of borders on that), it can cause you to develop a higher propensity for getting a mental illness later on in your life or having those kind of symptoms.

But that’s true of other things when you’re a child as well. If you’re abused in a secular sense, if you’re a victim of physical abuse when you’re a child, that can also increase your chances for developing depression and those kind of symptoms when you’re older. But by itself that’s not the case.. (Well you know whatever. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’ve tried to do this like 6 or 7, 8, 9 times and it keeps fucking up, so i’m just kind of saying stuff….)

Anyway! The mental illness rate among religious people is actually a little bit lower than it is among the general populace. So, those two things aren’t mutually inclusive by any means. Religious people are not mentally ill and mentally ill people aren’t religious, necessarily. Probably the reason that the rate is a little bit lower among religious populations is that there’s that community sort of benefit; that psychological benefit to having people in a like-minded group around you to provide support and to bolster your beliefs and help you when you’re starving and things like that. So, for those reasons (probably) the rate of mental illness is actually a little bit lower among Christians in the United States than it is among the general populace in the United States. So that’s something to chew on if you have a tendency to call religious people delusional.

Having a wrong idea is not delusional. and I wanted to go ahead and read from the DSM on this because the dictionary definition of “delusional” is probably a little bit more broad and can encompass some religious beliefs, but I want to just go ahead and read this bit:

[Paraphrasing]: ‘Delusions are fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence. They’re deemed bizarre if they’re clearly implausible and not understandable to same-culture peers and do not derive from ordinary life experiences. The distinction between a delusion and a strongly held idea is sometimes difficult to make and depends, in part, on the degree of conviction with which the belief is held despite clear or reasonable contradictory evidence regarding its veracity.’

So the reason that believing in god–especially in the United States–is not considered “delusional” is that it’s really common and it’s a very easily acceptable belief. You’re actually considered crazy if you DON’T believe in god in the United States. I’ve been called crazy for not believing in god. So, it’s more socially acceptable here and because of that fact, it can’t qualify as delusional because there are too many factors reinforcing your participation in that particular belief for it to be an outlier, such as delusions are kind of required to be.

An interesting example of this that I found in October is: a man in India sacrificed his 8-month-old child to a goddess for some reason or another, and a lot of people in the United States were calling that “crazy” and “delusional” behavior. If it’s considered socially normal (not “normal”–I’m not saying that people in India think that killing infants is normal, please don’t say that I’m saying that) but if it’s more culturally accepted by your religion, especially, that you can sacrifice an 8-month-old child and get any kind of positive benefit from it; if that’s a culturally accepted idea then it can’t qualify as delusional. Because the idea in India of what’s right and what’s wrong is different than the idea in america of what’s right and what’s wrong. And they would say I’m crazy for wearing pants, for example. (I am wearing pants.)

The cultural context is actually a pretty big factor in determining what qualifies as crazy behavior, so it’s not even strictly definitional from one place to another.

The biggest thing though–the biggest reason that you shouldn’t call religious people “delusional,” aside from the fact that you’re probably wrong: is that you’re throwing all of us under the bus; all of us who actually live with mental illness. (I have depression and anxiety to a lesser extent.) I’m not in the same category as a religious fundamentalist–or, I’m not in the same category as a person who chooses to have their child circumcised because of their religious beliefs. And it’s really not fair in any way, shape, or form to put normal (“Normal”) people with mental illness in the same category as people who make a decision to participate in a religious ritual, whether or not they were raised in it or whether they chose it as an adult–if they were “born again.”

It’s really just ableist and you’re probably not a professional, and you probably can’t speak to the issue if you’re making those kind of conflations. It’s a false equivalence: they’re not the same thing. Stop calling them the same thing if you’re not somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about. That’s pretty much all I had to add on the subject and I’ll see you guys later!

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Sorry that I kind of jump around while I’m talking. I have ADD and haven’t been taking the meds this week because it makes it practically impossible for me to eat a reasonable amount of food throughout the day. x.x Makes it difficult to complete a train of thought in a way that makes sense. Happy to clarify in the comments if you have questions!

Religiosity Still ≠ Mental Illness