soos_mite_ah

I have been following this channel for years and I think you'll like it The Finanacial Diet talks about money in a way that is relavent to cultural trends and the current economy. They also have more of a socialist leaning and I find their critique on the way things are right now and how to respond much more empathetic, nuanced, and well rounded than the ultra liberatarian approach sToP sPENdiNG mOnEY oN avoCADo toAST type financial gurus that are out there. I feel like they did a lot in terms of helping me get to having healtheir spending habits as well as a better mindset around money that helps me critically evaluate things before jumping on them.

The Dread Normally I like the time around New Years because I love a good new beginning and since I'm a Scorpio rising, I love a good rebirth and reinvention. But for some reason I find myself feeling this sense of dread with 2024. I briefly journaled about this last night in my notes section and I did talk about this in my post about working a corporate job for one year. And then I listened to Landslide and cried to that for a little bit before forcing myself to fall asleep at 2 am. I started crying because I started thinking of my parents dying, especially my dad because he is the only family member who I feel like I can connect to. I also started thinking about aging and how my mom wanted a baby and had less expectations of me when I was a baby and toddler and honestly liked me more. As I got older even though I like the person I'm growing into, my mom definitely doesn't feel the same way and I fall short of all of her standards and she can't relate to me and I can't ever go back to the version of myself that was more easily lovable in her eyes. Then I caught myself getting nostalgic over a childhood i didn't really have. I remember growing up the adults around me telling me to not rush into growing up and to enjoy the simplier times where you don't have to worry about anything. And I get it now. I feel like since moving out on my own, even though I can easily afford my lifestyle, I feel like I'm hyper aware of how much everything costs and my own sense of survival financially and politically. Don't get me wrong, I was still worried about these types of things growing up since I was 11 ish but I guess the thought of supporting myself financially was this abstract idea rather than something more tangible. I remember growing up having it drilled into me that if I don't do well in school, I won't get a good job, and if I don't get a good job, I'm going to be struggling for the rest of my life. So I was pretty anxious about things like grades, long term future plans, and what I was going to do in my life because in my elementary school logic, if I don't get a good education, I won't get into the advanced classes and stand out. And if I don't know what I want to do with my life, I wouldn't know what advanced placement classes to take which will affect my college applications and later my job prospects. Not to mention all the abuse from my parents I was subjected to growing up because there was only so much I could do to stand up for myself at 12. I say all this to say that when grown ups would tell me that childhood was a carefree time I would roll my eyes because of the pressure that was put on me. I wouldn't say that I'm the type to experience a lot of nostalgia because I feel like as I grow up and develop myself and get more responsibility and autonomy in my life, I find that life gets better. But while I'm more carefree now in a lot of ways, I do miss not being financially hyper aware and not understanding current events and how they can impact me. I remember growing up having the news in the background talk about various conflicts in the Middle East and everyone talking about the recession but in my 8-12 year old mind, there was a part of me that was like *well idk what's going on exactly but I'm sure the adults will take care of it and I'll be fine.* And now I'm the adult that's expected to take care of it and maintain myself. The anxiety I had about survival and maintaining myself when I was in school was for the future while the economic anxieties I have now are in the present. This might also have to be with the phase of self development I'm in but I miss not being as aware of baseline monetary survival in terms of my self development. I remember before so much of my self development was on things like dealing with various forms of trauma and becoming more self confident, and figuring out my values and ideals for my life. I did go through that and I put in the work in the past and I'm in a very good place in my life regarding being a well adjusted adult who makes good decisions and has their priorities straight. And I think at this point of I guess leveling up my life, so much of it has to do with making more money. My life is pretty great now and I'm content with my life but when I think of making my life better, I think of the following things: Travelling more = $$ Potentially going to grad school= $$$$$$$$$$$$$ Transitioning into a career in journalism= $$$ (the concern of money comes from the chance that I might not be making as much as I'm making now or a livable wage. I don't have a super lavish life now but I do like having a cushion and the peace of mind of living well below my means and that's on how much I'm making now. And I don't really want to make less than I make now because I'm used to my current salary.) Passive income so that I don't ever have to worry about the bills = $$$ Having an apartment in a walkable city that I can comfortably afford = $$$$$$$$$$$ Affording to buy a house or apartment in a decade or so = $$$$$$$$$$$ Being able to afford a kid down the road and maybe be a stay at home parent for a couple years = $$$$$$$$$ Having money to get a hair cut and ocassionally get a facial or mani pedi and go to fancy restaurants (I can afford this now but I feel a little weird about spending money in superflous ways given my income even though it's not that bad).= $ I also caught myself thinking about 2014-2016 a lot today. It feels crazy to think that 2014 was 10 years ago because it doesn't feel that way to me. I guess it's because sometimes I feel like a 17 year old, that is until I talk to an actual 17 year old. And I also think about how I thought shit was crazy in 2016 and things have gotten crazier since, from countless scandals from the Trump presidency that caused me to disassociate from the news and current events from 2018-2019, to a pandemic, an insurrection, me losing my bodily autonomy to get an abortion, and multiple genocides that the U.S. is complicit in. I remember a couple months ago asking my parents if the world has always been this crazy and I'm just old enough to understand this now. I was trying to draw a comparison from the 90s and 2000s vs everything post 2015. I was 15 in 2015 and I think that was the age when I started being more aware of my surroundings and that's when Trump started running. So it's like, is the craziness just coinciding with the age that I started becoming more aware or was it always crazy and I was just not aware of it before? And my parents were like, no, shit was more chill back then even though there was chaos, people weren't as polarized and things didn't get this bad in terms of the middle class standard of living and fascism. Speaking of which, I remember back when I was a kid that Homer Simpson was supposed to be framed a babbling idiot who was not doing great for his life. He works a dead end job in the powerplant, his neighbors have nicer things than him. But now, it's like... *damn, maybe Homer is doing good for himself. He owns his house and is able to support a family of five and takes care of his dad all from a powerplant job.* And I think this has to do with how typical milestones for a middle class life has eroded to where they seem like luxuries. Like why tf are all the affordable homes getting bought and rented out leaving us with having to buy a house for more than half a million dollars. When I think of a million dollar home, the 2000s kid imagines a palace, not a two story house with a pool. My boomer dad even notices this. Also, as I'm writing this down, I find myself thinking about this post I saw a while back that said "adulthood is when your mood is tied to the economy." I'm also thinking of this video: The line that's hit me is "But don't be stupid. You have responsibility, not wisdom. And that's gonna show." And I also think of this tiktok as well: I don't really know how to end this post. I hope the meeting I have set up with my financial advisor in a couple weeks goes well.

Media Consumption Analysis 2023 I was looking for my media consumption analysis journal entry for 2022 and I guess I just never did one lol. Back in 2021, I had 3 posts on this topic where I discuss life experience content, video essays, and self improvement. I feel like I still occupy the same categories in my media diet but the ratio of it is different. I feel like I take in mostly video essay content. I think I watch maybe something more self improvement related like a couple times a week or so. And life experience content is kind of sprinkled in there at random to where I can't say that any particular creator sticks out a lot. As I look into a good chunk of my subscriptions, most of them are video essay channels. I wouldn't say that I found myself hyperfocussing on any one channel rather I just watch videos as I find interesting. I have also been watching a lot of content from Vaush because I think his takes are pretty well rounded and the topics he covers are informative. Basically, this year I have mainly been focussing on enjoying my hobbies and interest and letting me living my life be the thing that develops me rather than content. Nevertheless, I went ahead and attached a document with my youtube subscriptions since the picture wasn't showing up correctly when I tried to insert it to this post. I will say that I have been watching a lot of things on Tiktok. It's hard to really capture what my consumption was like because people typically watch things on their for you page rather than just the people they are subscribed to. I did catch myself getting some early symptoms of chronically online brainrot in the last month or so. As a result, I went ahead and deleted the app. Going forward in 2024, I want to be more offline because I'm at a point where the internet feels like it's distorting my sense of reality and that certain popular trends are getting on my nerves so I think it's time for me to touch grass lol. youtube subscriptions 2023.docx

To Do List 1/5 Figure out boundaries with family and discuss the following topics in therapy: My relationship with my dad and my takeaways from the trip Legacy Trauma: My therapist explained that this is something I have after I explained some of the things I explained in my main journal. What healthy interdependence looks like + just do a brief check up on my relationship with my boyfriend and friends. My feelings around having kids: I have been thinking about this for quite some time but I think working with a professional would be a good idea. How to deal with family relationships going forward + what certain conversations look like. Get a haircut: I've been looking like an egg recently lol and I want to also try something new. Be more aligned with my values: Start volunteering at a homeless shelter Learn to engage with right wing people Plan out your trip to Washington D.C. and your month long trip in the later part of the year. Get that promotion at work (will be in June/July) Contribute more to your team meetings and gain more expertise in the software I specialize in. Start meal prepping so you aren't always eating girl dinners: I started doing like a Hello Fresh meal kit once a month so that I can introduce myself to new recepies here and there and I think it's been helping. Research your career in journalism more: also part of the preparing for D.C trip

Things I Want to Discuss in Therapy Just a little mental check list My relationship with my dad and my takeaways from the trip. Legacy Trauma: My therapist explained that this is something I have after I explained some of the things I explained above. What healthy interdependence looks like + just do a brief check up on my relationship with my boyfriend and friends. Where to go with my family relationships. My feelings around having kids: I have been thinking about this for quite some time but I think working with a professional would be a good idea.

My Trip with my Dad The trip that I took to the northeast was interesting because this was the first time that I travelled with my dad. Normally, I feel a sense of dread when it comes to the topic of travelling with my family but I thought I'd give it a chance because I have never done it before and because I thought that it would give me more clarity on how I feel about my family overall. Here are some of my take aways: I might not have super fuzzy feeling toward my dad but I can tolerate him and I enjoy being in his presance. It's safe to say that much of what made travelling and even living with my family difficult was my mom and the ick vibes that largely come from her. I can't help but wonder what my relationship to my dad would be like if my mom didn't influence the dynamic. Compared to my mom, I have more of a basis on the relationship I have with my dad as he did take more time out to cultivate that. He is also someone that I can go to, not really emotionally but more so logistically if I get into a difficult situation because I know he can handle it and not freak out on me. I feel safe with him on that regard and that alone helped me get closer to him growing up. He also managed both his South Asian identity and his living circumstances well and he was a huge help in me figuring out how to navigate life as a South Asian person living in the U.S. since he immigrated here in his early 20s and went to college here. And this also helped my friends as well since most South Asian kids often feel like they were at odds when it came to their home life and life outside of home. I atleast had one parent that was accommodating and understanding. I can have enjoyable surface level conversations and intellectually engage with him which does a lot to make me feel like I can confide in him and open up to him regarding my thoughts especially compared to my mom. However, after having a couple conversations, I realized that my dad can't guide me on making life long fulfilling decisions because quite frankly, he hasn't reflected on his life until his 60s and didn't think about his decisions before making them. For one, I feel like we operate very differently because I have a very carefully thought out person. While he does have a basic sense of self awareness in being able to admit when he's wrong, read and understand things about people, and not behave like a total psychopath, introspection is not something that is well developped in his tool kit and I find that absolutely wild. That said, I do think there is something I can learn from my dad and his sense of impulsivity since it did pay out in various areas of his life, mainly when it comes to his career, finances, and living situation. However, this sense of impulsivity was awful for his marriage and other relationships in his personal life. He rushed into an arranged marriage with my mom and he was one of those people who tried to have a baby, me, to fix the marriage. And there is a part of me where even though I don't have a super amazing relationship with my dad, where I can talk to my dad about a lot of deep topics and emotionally open up to him, I still cling on to it because it's the only family realtionship I have that I can tolerate. I'm definitely going to explore more of this in therapy. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I also wrote about other feelings I was getting that is related to how I feel about my family. This is from my notes section on my phone: I have unpacked a lot of this in therapy and I have been unpacking the guilt that I have regarding the conclusion that I have reached regarding the relationship I have with my mom. A lot of the guilt comes from how mothers are held to a stricter standard for parenting compared to fathers and how we also hold mothers to a pedastal because of the higher standards. I don't want to have a bias against my mom because she is a woman and because I have some type of internalized misogyny that I'm reflecting back at her. As a woman, I understand a lot of the pain she has gone through and I can see parts of myself in her to where I think that I would have ended up like her if I was simply born in a different time. And even though I'm not a mother, I can still empathize with the sacrifices she has made and how hard of a job it is to be a mother. However, as her daughter, I'm still in pain and I'm still angry because of the things she has put me through and that is valid as well. And unfortunately, I don't think I can continue to have a relationship with her, I don't know what that will look like in the long term practically and I'm still coming to terms with this realization but this is something that I'm going to be exploring more in therapy. Speaking of which, the pain I feel from a lack of guidance in my life seems to be a common theme in a lot of my interpersonal relationships and the sense of lonliness I feel in adulthood. That is also something I'm exploring more in therapy. I have explained this in the context of my family but it also shows up in my friendships in the way that part of me clings onto my friends for that sense of guidance in difficult times and gains fufillment from in a normal situation. But it still doesn't fill the void because my friends are my age and we're in similar life stages and I wish I had someone older and wiser to guide me and give a bigger perspective. This desire for guidance is also a common theme that shows up in the emotional needs of my inner teenager and how I look back at my former self. Basically, there was a lot that I had to figure out alone as a teenager and while I was proud of that growing up because I thought that it made me mature of my age, as I got older I realized that it was kind of fucked up that I had to deal with so many difficult things all by myself and how I couldn't go to my parents for guidance. I also dealt with and worked through a past of hyperindependence and I guess I moved the pendulum a smidge too far in the opposite direction which has left me with a sensitvity of being alone at times when I deal with difficult things emotionally here and there.

My Trip to the North East I travelled during the holidays to Boston and then made my way up to Maine, went to Vermont and New Hampshire, and went back down to Boston to fly back to Dallas. I was gone for about a week. I flew out of Dallas on 12/22 and got back on 12/30. Boston had a dark academia vibe to it due to the weather and the presance of the numerous universities in the area. I caught myself getting a little nostalgic about my time at school since I am missing the same degree of intellectual stimulation from my day job but the stress of school was still very much fresh in my mind since I was a student just last year. I definitely got strong Catholic vibes from this place likely due to the prevalance of the Irish and Italian communities. I saw a couple of cathedrals and I went into an art museaum that gave off a very Catholic vibe aesthetically, which I'm here for because I find the Protestant aesthetic to be boring lol. Speaking of which, I enjoyed the architechture of the city and given that this is the second time I have visted Boston, the last time being when I was 7 years old meaning there is only so much I remember, and I am visiting after travelling to the UK, it has been interesting to be able to pick out the England vibe from New England. I also really enjoyed the public transportation there as well as the general sense of walkability of course. I enjoyed some Italian food here and the best lobster roll I've ever had. I've enjoyed the lobster during my trip in Boston and in Maine and quite frankly, I feel like it has less to do with the freshness and more to do with how they just know how to prepare the lobster better over there. I had a lobster roll a few months back in Dallas, and while it scratched an itch, I found myself drowning it in tarter sauce because it didn't taste seasoned enough. That was most definitely not the case in New England lol. In Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, my dad and I drove around and visited the small Christmas towns in the area as well as looked at the Christmas lights. I was honestly going for a Hallmark card vibe with this trip because I wanted to tune into the festivity of Christmas more. However, rather than a Hallmark card, I got more of a Nightmare Before Christmas vibe. By that I mean that I didn't get much snow as I hoped but I did get a lot of fog which among all the lights and Christmas decor, gave these small towns a festive yet spooky vibe. I still really enjoyed it. The drive through these states were very sceanic. The buildings have a historic small town feel to it that gave it a very calming, cozy, and quaint atmosphere. I definitely started understanding why the main characters in the Hallmark movies always found themselves falling in love and wanting to settle into these small towns and leave their big city life behind lol. I can honestly see myself doing to same once I get much older but for now, I think I want to live in a larger city. We also saw some beautiful landscapes in our drives, from the seashore and light houses in Maine, to the mountain ranges in Vermont and New Hamspire, and the little bit of snow we saw in Vermont. We also briefly visted some national parks as well. I was a little surprised by how rural these 3 states were. Vermont especially felt small because we were able to cover much of the state within a couple of days (versus how whenever you drive through Texas, you're going to be stuck in Texas for a while lol). Their capitol Montpelier has only 8000 residents. I guess I have a tendency with associating the north east with a bustiling urban environment due to cities like New York City, Boston, and Philidelphia as well as due to the progressive politics. But no, they have a lot of little towns in these areas. We stayed in an inn in Maine, Hallmark style lol, and it was in a small town with less than 10,000 people. The town was pretty walkable and the inn was so cozy. I enjoyed curling up next to the fire place and doing some of my office work from there. I also got to talking to an older couple that lived in New Hampshire. The older man eventually started talking about family values and how it's one of those things that he's passionate about. My knee jerk reaction was to think of family values in the right-wing Judeo-Christian way but I was pleasantly surprised when he started talking about the matter from a more left wing perspective that I personally resonatted with. The older lady who was in charge of the inn also talked about getting multiple COVID booster shots. I say all of this to say that while I was mainly in a very rural area much like the ones you find in the South or around Texas, there was definitely a very different vibe despite these states lacking in diversity. I guess there is a big difference redneck country and lumberjack country lol. It's kind of like when people talk about how things are the same thing but in a different font. Except in this case, it's like different things in the same font. Sure they can look the same on the surface, but they have a very different vibe. But once I got back to Dallas, the whole place felt huge and urban compared to where I was in the last few days. Over all, I enjoyed the trip. I found it to be very refreshing to get out of the Dallas area and go somewhere I had never been to before. It was nice to be in a sceanic, small, rural, but quaint and peaceful area. It was also nice to be able to walk places too lol (you know how much I like my walkable cities).

1 Year Working in my Corporate Job Today marks the 1 year anniversary of me getting hired at my current place of employment. I went to bed with this overwhelming feeling of dread despite this year going well for me. And I just want to reflect on my that may be so. I think part of it is that I'm still getting used to the flow of things. While I have gotten into a routine on a daily, weekly, and monthly level a while back, I think a part of me is still adjusting to getting into a routine in a larger scale of things in terms of years since I have only been working full time for a year now compared to the 16+ years I have spent being a student. This sense of dread isn't a foriegn one. I think the last time I felt this was when I was around 4 years old. I remember on a Sunday morning, I walked over to my parents after brushing my teeth and they asked me if I was ready to go back to school tomorrow. I didn't reply with a yes or no rather I asked them how many more times I would have to go to school since I have gone to school for 2 weeks now. My mom then explained how I will need to graduate high school which is another 12 years and then I will go to college for 4 years and then another 2 years for a masters degree. I remember 4 year old me feeling dizzy and overwhelmed with this information as I was using my little fingers to add up the years and then compaing how I've only been alive for 4 years. I remember thinking about how graduating high school and college felt like they were life times away from me. And because I was still adjusting to school, I remember going to my room, laying there for a little bit, going through the motions of the rest of the day, and then I cried myself to sleep because going to school for that long felt dreadful to me. That's not to say that I didn't like school at all. If anything, I remember as a kid wanting to go to school even on a Saturday at times so that I could play with the other kids and see what else I can learn. But there were things at school that annoyed me, from the teachers that would do the most, to the gross kids that always had snot coming out of their noses. I can see the parallels of this in my relationship to work. The thought of me working til I am in my 60s feels dreadful and overwhelming and as a 20 somthing, it feels like it's life times away from me. I will say that I am enjoying my working life more than school because it is less stressful and I have more free time to pour into other areas of my life but there are things in my job that do get on my nerves. I guess what my sense of dread is saying is this: "Damn... is this my life now? Am I going to be doing this (not necessarily working at my current job but just working full time in general) for another 40 years?? Like this year has already felt long, how am I going to deal going forward? I've heard from my friends who have been working a little longer than I have that the first year after college that you are working always feels the longest. But after that you get used to it and then things start going by fast. I'm also not naive to think that every day at work is going to be amazing and that I won't have phases where I don't like my job or that I'm not enthusiastic to work. I understand things can come up but as an adult, I still have responsibilities I need to fulfill even if I don't really feel like it. Another factor that I think is coming up is that the last few months have been rough on me in terms of my motivation to work. October and November came with my work load doubling because of restructuring in the company. I know that sounds dramatic, but it wasn't that bad considering I have a pretty chill job. Still, it came with some adjustments I needed to make to my workflow and my boundaries and I also had to learn how to use another software in addition to the one I already knew. On top of that, I was grieving and processing a lot regarding the number of genocides that's been going on and the last thing I wanted to do was argue with Barbara over check numbers while the world was on fire around me. Everything felt really pointless and I think it further solidfied my understanding that this is not a place that I can work at for an extended period of time. My plan is to get a couple promotions and then leave to pursue something that is more meaningful for me. Because the additional work load and the additional responsibilities I would get after a couple of promotions also fill me with this sort of dread. While I like the tasks at my job, I don't like the subject matter and that affects my motivation to continue on learning and growing. By December, while I reached a point where I have processed much of my grief and emotions, the holidays came around and that sapped my motivation to work in a different way. I didn't want to work. I wanted to curl up in a blanket as the days got shorter and spend time with family and friends. It also felt weird not having a long Christmas break or Thanksgiving break. I felt irritated the days leading up to Thanksgiving and Christmas wondering why tf I was at work and then I felt really irritated the day after when I had to return to work. I caught myself feeling more nostalgic during Christmas than in previous years. I think during high school and college I was too stressed and burnt out to be feeling the holiday cheer because I had exams during that time and by the time Christmas break rolled around, my energy levels crashed. I started thinking of all the little things that I did during Christmas as a little kid like making cookies, decorating the Christmas tree, putting up lights around the house, getting Christmas gifts for everyone etc. and how I didn't continue all of that because I eventually got the gist that my family didn't particularly care and that they were just humoring me as a small child so that my hopes didn't crash. I don't mean to say that in a harsh way rather it has more to do with my parents coming from India and Bangladesh where Christmas isn't that big and because they aren't Christian and the reason why I was invested into Christmas was because I grew up in the U.S. and I just wanted to be a part of the festivities the other kids in my class were in (and also, who doesn't love decorating a cookie or making an ornament). But yeah, those memories did make me a little sad and it made me not want to work. I did feel better after attending a couple of Christmas parties, decorating a house plant in my apartment, and making some cookies and brownies with my friends. I also took a trip with my dad to the New England States over Christmas. I enjoyed travelling up there and I will make a post about that as well on here. Even though I felt refreshed after that trip, I still didn't feel motivated to jump back into work. Maybe it's the build up of the last few months of me not being motivated and that just needs to phase out. Maybe I'm still adjusting to the yearly flow of not being in school anymore. Maybe I'm just having an existential crisis of me working in corporate for a year and not knowing what's in store in the years to come (as a result I ended up stalking the linked in profiles of people I knew from college, which then devolved into me lurking on the people I went to high school with lol). But hey, I feel a lot better after writing all of this out in my journal and after taking a short nap during my lunch break. I wonder how these emotions will unfold in the coming weeks and how my year will unfold careerwise in the year to come.

The American Education System (and Just Society as a Whole) I can't believe I haven't written about this especially since I have talked to a lot of my friends about this topic. The education system as it is right now is giving me an existential crisis in terms of having a kid. I have seen a lot of accounts of teachers expressing what they are encountering in schools in this post pandemic world and it's very concerning. A lot of these kids are so behind in terms of literacy that you have middle schoolers who are reading at a 3rd grade level. I mean you can most definitly say that a lot of it probably had to do with online learning, something that even I as a college student struggled with but I recognize that it's so much worse when you have trouble retaining basic and fundamental information and literacy as a small child. However, it's important to recognize that it's not just COVID. You have the impact of the no child left behind policy where kids are being passed along when they haven't gotten the skills they need to go to the next level causing things to snowball and them to be even more confused and behind in years to come. You have how teachers are constantly burnt out and can't even pay their bills much less educate kids properly even if they wanted to (honestly, whenever I find out that someone I knew has become a teacher or a nurse, I immediately think they are in the trenches). Then you have the influence of politics and anti-intellectualism with all of their book bans and fear mongering. And of course, even if you aren't a facist, this rage against teachers and the education system is trickling down and causing people to disrespect teachers even less causing more uproar in classrooms and little Tommy can't get disciplined because the teacher is villanized when they tell his parents he's misbehaving because the parents think Tommy is a perfect angel. Not to mention the school shootings and other people's feral kids who are probably feral because their parents are neglecting them by shoving an ipad in their face or by doing gentle parenting incorrectly where they just don't have any boundaries or structure with their kid. And honestly, sometimes you can't even blame the parents because they're probably working multiple jobs to pay the bills because we live in a cost of living crisis and they probably just want an hour or two of peace while they get dinner ready and decompress. And of course these kids don't see hope for the future and the thought of wanting to get higher education because that shit is expensive and they can tell that life is going to shit and it's really hard to have aspirations to guide you and ground you so you have something to work towards under these conditions. The parent's aren't okay, the teachers aren't okay, and the children are definitely not okay. I'm not going to blame the children in this situation. They're just here and no generation is inherently feral lol. But socially there is a lot of things happening at this time and schooling is not exempt from that. And while being child free is becoming more accepted nowadays, I also think that there are still a lot of parents who don't put much thought into having kids. There are people who treat having kids as a think to mark off their bucket list, or treat having a baby as a cute little accessory / mini me. And of course you have the people who are just recklessly having sex as well. So there are definitely parents out there who didn't go into this thinking about the educational implications of how they are going to raise their child from their basic literacy to things like higher education and extracurriculars. And I just think it's buck wild to not think of these things because it's just so different from the way that I grew up. Having a good education was front and center of how my parents were raising me. Though I will admit that they went overboard to where they had unrealistic expectations that were abusive and they could have also focused on other areas of my development, the bottom line is that my education was prioritized. It was prioritized in the form of being sent to private schools because the schools in my area weren't that great, my mom sitting with me as I did my homework, doing other school related activities outside of school, travelling, and having college being an expectation. And when I hear about these accounts and these kids, I honestly think about the amount of privilege I had in this upbringing and how that has shaped me not only into who I am today and the opportunities I have, but also my ability to make effective, well thought out decisions in my life. And honestly, sometimes I wonder if I decide to have a kid if I would be able to provide for them in the same way in terms of giving them a quality education, whether it be public or private, and travelling with them. I think that on top of being able to sustain having a kid, there are added costs on the quality of life that I want to give my child especially in these conditions where certain life styles aren't as accessible as they once were in say the early 2000s for example. On top of that, my dad was self employed and worked like 20 hours a week and my mom was a stay at home mom during my early childhood. I also had relatives who helped my mom take care of me when I was an infant. I had a lot of time with my family and while I have a good bit of trauma, being materially neglected or neglected from the attention of my parents because they weren't around or they were too tired to engage with me is not one of them. And I don't know if I will have similar circumstances that will give me that community and financial support to raise a kid well. And then of course you have the health care system and issues around maternity leave, the cost of life in general, the lack of community, and the possibility of me bearing most of the load in raising the kid. I sometimes feel like having a child feels out of reach even if I wanted one because I feel like I have to marry really rich to give my child the life deserve and / or move to another country like New Zealand and uproot my entire life so that my child doesn't have to be raised in the U.S. Unless I'm rich or I marry rich, it's hard for me to think of raising a kid in the U.S. Like there are some serious changes that need to happen in this country before I think of bringing a child into this world. I'm talking universal healthcare, gun regulations, affordable higher education, better wages, a reformed school system, etc. and a big part of me thinks that it's unlikely that all of this will happen within the next 10 or so years. So even if I have what it takes to be a good parent and even if I have a desire to be a parent, systemically things feel like they are stacked against me and my ability to provide a good life for my kid. And that is a horrible thought to have in my opinion. I know we talk about being pro-choice in terms of having rights to an abortion but also, I think being pro-choice includes the choice to have a child and alleviate the decisions that can sway the decision of people who would otherwise want to be a parent but is afraid that they can't provide for their kid once they bring them to this world. Advocating for better wages and working conditions so that people can be with their family in a healthy way is pro-choice. Advocating for maternity and paternity leave is pro-choice. Advocating for proper education is pro choice. Anything that can improve the living conditions of even the people who are living right now, is pro choice.

I find myself contemplating motherhood a lot in terms of me trying to make more long term plans for my life. I'm trying to figure out if this is the path for me, if this is something I should do, and if this is something I'm even cut out for. I also want my thoughts to be organized in one place.

The Aesthetic of Womanhood I have written in the past about my thoughts around womanhood and adulthood in general. I have some more thoughts that I want to expand on. I touch on how part of the reason I don't feel like an adult isn't because I'm not measuring up to adult responsibilities rather because I feel like I don't fit the aesthetics of adulthood. I feel like I've unpacked a lot of that limitting belief, however, I feel like there has been a greater emphasis on how I feel like I don't fit the aesthetics of womanhood lately. I've been having some weird feelings around my gender where sometimes I feel like a blob rather than a woman. Like I can accept myself and see myself as a girl and an adult but for some reason not a woman. As my nonbinary friends like to say "Gender is a performance and I have forgotten my lines." I feel like lately I've grounded myself in this regard and touched some grass but I still wanted to spill everything in a journal post. Basically it started like this: I started watching some self care videos because I find it relaxing to listen to them in the background. A lot of it were just people talking about their skincare routine, their shower routine, etc. And then the algorithm did its thing and I started getting recommeded these "beauty maintenance videos" where women would talk about their extensive beauty practices beyond showering and skincare. These include but aren't limitted to getting your lashes done, getting your nails done every two weeks, getting a facial once a month by an esthetician, getting waxed, and even in come cases botox and filler. There was also an emphasis on dressing in a classy old money style mainly made of neutral clothing in simple but fitted silhouettes. And all of this was in the name of elevating yourself to become the woman of your dreams and glowing up. Me finding this type of content also coincided with my birthday. Normally, I do get the birthday blues but this year that just didn't happen (rather I had the genocidal blues but that's another topic I have covered previously). Instead, I caught myself feeling a heightened insecurity about my appearance as someone who was turning 24. It wasn't about aging rather it was about how there are things about my appearance that I am still insecure about since I was 13/14 years old. I still do to a certain extent feel like that teenager that is still waiting for that glow up. A glow up back then simply meant becoming hot after puberty. It meant getting taller, having your weight get distributed in a less awkward way, learning how to dress, getting clearer skin after the hormonal acne cleared up, getting your braces removed etc. For me, glowing up in a lot of ways connected to me losing weight. And even after all these years, I never lost that extra chub, rather I probably added more to it as my body transitioned from having a narrower adolescent frame to a larger womanly frame. And by that I mean that in addition to probably gaining some fat I also gained a lot of muscle and my shoulders and hips did get wider. I notice this a lot more when I'm volunteering with teenagers where a normal to slightly chubby teenager still looks smaller than a 20 something that is quite thin purely because the teenager's bodies haven't finished growing. While that observation does help in the way that I tone down the unrealistic standards I hold myself at times, in the end of the day, the fact still remains, I am bigger than when I was when I was 14 and starving myself. If I was too big then, I am a monster now. To tie everything together, my insecurities were flaring up a bit around my birthday around the time I found a lot of the glow up/ beauty maintenance content. And as someone who still felt like a teenager who didn't become hot after puberty and who doesn't feel like an adult due to aesthetic reasons and who is watching these grown women have these intensive beauty routines, the content started affecting my psyche. I also think that me being on my own and financailly independent is a factor because even though I wanted to do some things like getting my eyebrows done, I either didn't have the money or my parents would have stopped me. But basically, through this content, I felt a little pressured to have a "beauty maintence routine" even if it was expensive as fuck just to feel more like a woman who appeared more, elegant, classy, and sophisticated, adjectives that I don't think really apply to me but that I associate with being a woman. I honestly feel like I need to touch grass and this video knocked some sense into me tbh on how niche this really is and how fiscially unattianable this is for most people especially in this economy.

Proximity to Violence And here is that post (plus some more). I'm just going to talk about some of the things that I encountered over the past year. Almost Got into a Lethal Car Crash I was driving home from a date with my boyfriend back in March. As I was approaching downtown, there were a lot of heavy rain. It was sprinkling from where I left but as I got closer to downtown, the rain was getting pretty heavy. Anyone in the Dallas area knows that the highway downtown is really chaotic and confusing. You can't just take an exit and get out because the exits will route you towards other routes. My windshield wipers were on max but my windows were also getting fogged up from inside no matter what I did. I felt like I was driving on the highway half blind. On top of that, there was also part of my route that was dealing with a lot of flooding. I drove by 3 cars down town that were either broken down or crashed as I tried not to think of myself having a similar fate. I got out of the highway as soon as I could and parked next to a gas station. I called my dad and told him about this situation and that I pulled over to collect myself and that I'm going to take the long way home via service roads instead of getting back on the highway. The first thing I said was that I'm alright because I wouldn't be surprised if I made him jump considering the weather and how long it was taking for me to get home. I didn't want his first thought to be that something happened to me. About 10 minutes later, I started back driving home. I felt safer than when I was on the highway but I had a tense uneasiness in the back of my mind as I proceeded cautiously. My boyfriend normally messages me to let me know when he got home safely. I didn't get that notification yet and I knew that he should be home by now judging by where he is and where he lived. I couldn't help but wonder if something happened to him. I kept telling myself as I was driving that I don't know anything for sure. He might also just be fine. I tried to stay focussed and told myself "Hey, you can freak out once you get home and check your phone then, but now you need to focus on getting yourself home safely. You just need to hold on for 30 more minutes" Those 30 minutes felt like forever. I was tempted to speed up on these empty service roads since there weren't many cars present and because I wanted to get home and end this as soon as possible. But I kept going at a slow and reasonable speed because even though my impulses suggested otherwise, I knew better and I wasn't going to do something reckless just because I was anxious. I passed two more cars that were also broken down on the side of the road which served as an additional reminder to hold it together. I eventually got to a red light. It was a four land road, two on my side and two on the other, and there were 3 cars in right lane right behind me. As I was patiently waiting for the red light to turn green, I saw from the corner of my eye a car that was coming out of the highway that showed no signs of slowing down, much less stopping. When the light finally turned green, I did not move. The cars behind me started honking, irritated about the hold up because no one wanted to be in the storm and just get home as soon as possible. I stood my ground because regardless if I was right or wrong about the car speed from the highway, I'd rather bee a nuisance for 3 seconds than to deal with thousands of dollars in damages, or worse, get hurt or get another person hurt. And I was right. The car from the highway didn't stop and ran the red light. Had I gone, they would've either hit me or the car behind me in a high speed from the driver's side. Someone could have died. I tried to keep a calm and level head after all of this. I kept telling myself that I cannot freak out now and I just have to hold it together for 10 more minutes. I did just that and once I got home I called my boyfriend to make sure he was alright. He picked up the phone and I told him about my drive back, sobbing as I let myself feel the full extent of my fear and how terrified I was for my life from the time I got to downtown, to the cars that I kept seeing that were on the side after crashing into something, to the car that almost hit me at a high speed. All of this was on a Thrusday night and I still had work the next day. I forced myself to go to work and then I let myself process this situation over the weekend. ------------------------------------ The Allen Outlet Mall Shooting I did multiple posts on this matter but basically my friends live near the mall and my friend's uncle worked in the mall. That man saw everything. He saw people get shot and killed and knew one of the victims. Basically, I was 2 connections away from a mass shooting victim and that fucked with my head. ------------------------------------ The Suicide at the Gun Range I was catching up with a friend in August and she was telling me about some of the stuff going on in her life. She talked to me about how her boyfriend's friend has a few friends who work in a gun range. A couple weeks back, there was a sketchy looking guy who walked into the gun range and tried to kill himself. The bullet likely richoted off something and somehow hit one of the employees there who died instantly. My friend and her boyfriend went to the scene and saw his boyfriend's friend lying on the ground while his other friend was trying to give him CPR. I have met the guy who was giving CPR once and I met my friend's boyfriend and it just felt crazy that I met these people. I never met the victim but I know the people connected to the whole situation. The following days I felt shaken up by the whole thing. I was still dealing with the nightmares from the outlet mall shooting and I felt that this situation certainly didn't help. Once again, I was two connections away from a victim of gun violence. ------------------------------------ The Genocide in Gaza I have been writing multiple posts about this matter but I think shit got much more real when I realized that I'm like a 2-3 connections away from people who had to live under constant bombardment for an entire month. I'm going to include what I wrote previously here again. ------------------------------------ The Plane Crash I walked into a plane crash scene on November 21st, less than two weeks before I'm writing this. My boyfriend and I went to Target to get some things for my friend for her upcoming birthday. Afterwards, we were hungry and thought to get something to eat. I found a quesadilla place near by and we decided to go there. Once we got there, we saw like 5 cop cars and a couple of state trooper cars. My boyfriend and I were like *wtf that's really weird, I wonder what's going on.* When we got to the parking lot, we saw a bunch of people from the news and a small crowd of people trying to figure out what's going on. The air didn't feel tense as if someone got shot up but there was a lot of uncertainty. I saw a whole section of a building covered up as well as a small section covered up on the ground. My boyfriend jokingly asked if I thought that was a body but said that he doubted it because so many other things are covered up and there are many reasons why this would be so. We were just awkwardly laughing abou the absurdity of the situation since we just got here because we wanted some quesadillas. Then I went to go check if the place was still open because I was hungry and of course it wasn't. We figured that nothing in this area was open so we went to a near by Chipotle instead. Later that night, I saw on the news that a plane crashed in front of a near by nail salon and it destroyed the car parked in front of the building. This happend like an hour and a half before my boyfriend and I got there. While the building was damaged, luckily no one in the building or in the near by shopping area was hurt. However, the pilot died. I told this to my boyfriend and I was talking on the phone with my dad about this who called me to see if I was okay because he saw that this happened near by where my location was at. I felt a sense of shock wash over me. Did I actually see the body of the pilot covered up? Like bruh.. I was just trying to get a quesadilla and I ended up stepping into a plane crash scene wtf. And while this alone is kind of crazy, I started thinking about how I had a lot of connections to violent shit during this year. I could feel my brain try to kick in and find some sort of meaning and pattern from these situations because generally speaking, the brain likes predictable things because it gives it a sense of certainty which aids in survival. The world felt unpredicatable, crazy, and most of all unsafe. I still feel this way even though that sense of shock has worn off after a day or two. But it's still in the back of my mind the number of violent events I'm connected to and how wild that is for this one year which is why I decided to write about this as an effort to process things. I know that I have this mild form of secondary PTSD from the outlet mall shooting and I'm still dealing with the grief regarding the genocide in Gaza. I feel like dealing with this type of violent unpredictability from the almost car crash, to the plane crash, to shootings since they can literally happen anywhere. I wish I could wrap up this post with a nice bow but I suppose this is something that I'm grappling with and still unsure how to fully move forward or what to take from all of this.

Emotional Neglect I feel like emotional neglect is something that I deal with in times of emotional distress and rejection. The emotional neglect really comes up for me when people cancel on me last minute, when I'm left to face shit myself in an event where I don't have the emotional resources to face it alone, and when I'm alone in the holidays. People Cancelling Last Minute / A Bunch of People Cancelling at Once Events like this often start with me feeling irritated followed mainly by a sense of saddness and lonliness. I'm annoyed and disappointed because whenever I make plans with people I'm often looking forward to spending time with them and sharing various things about my life and to check on how they are doing. I get a lot of fulfillment from my friendships and it often fills the void that family can't fill for me. And I guess the cancelled plans or scarce amount of time I spend with people can lead to me feeling like I'm not a priority. I know that this is a little egotistical and I don't deal with the anger for very long because I love my friends and I know they care about me back but that sometimes life just happens and because as their friend, I want them to have multifaceted and fulfilling lives. But it's like, while I know my friendships are reciprocal, I often feel like I care more because I have more skin in the dynamic where if my friendships fell through, there goes my social support but in the case of my friends, if their friend circle fell through, they still have their family to fall back on as a source of support. And yes, there are times when everyone is booked and busy and doesn't have time to hang out with you. In those times, I feel like most people lean on family more and use that time to prioritize those relationships but in my case, I don't have that. Dealing with things myself when I don't have the emotional resources to face it alone While I am fairly independent and comfortable being alone, I think my emotional needs are higher during times of a lot of emotional distress therefore when those needs aren't met, it picks at my wound of emotional neglect more. I think this ties into how I had to figure out a lot of shit on my own growing up and even though I was able to, it's kinda fucked up that I was in that position in the first place. This led me to be pretty hyper indpendent growing up to where expressing emotions and vulnerability, even to myself, was a challenge. And while I resolved much of that, I think part of me may have over corrected to where when I am faced with challenging situations emotionally, when I don't have that support for whatever reason, it brings me back to the pain that I associate with realizing that the hyper independence messed me up. It's like I have over corrected just a little bit. I think it also has to do with a long history of not having guidance growing up from my parents. I think that somethign that is painful in my parental relationships now is that I feel like I can't go to them for life advice as someone who is trying to navigate life after college. And sure I have a good head on my shoulders and I know I can figure it out, but it is still hard that I don't have that parental figure in my life who knows the bigger picture to guide me. And I wish I had that type of bond with my parents but I don't because of things like generational trauma and stunted development. I feel like this is especially the case when it comes to trying to figure out how to handle emotions such as grief or how to navigate life transitions. I felt this sense of emotional neglect in this context when I was dealing with the emotional aftermath of the Allen Outlet Mall shooting, when I learned that my friend's boyfriend's friend was murdered, when I felt alone in dealing with the grieving process of genocide, and during the times I was trying to figure out how to navigate friendships and career matters after college. In those moments involving violence, I wanted to cry and vent to my parents. Sure it was nice to have my peers there, but it felt like we were all on the same boat in trying to navigate this from our limitted life experience. I wanted to have an actual adult I can go to and it's weird that the adults I interact who are older than me are all either my coworkers, whom I'm definitly not going to trauma dump on, or my parents, who aren't the best in giving guidance. This has especially been the case when it coems to me trying to figure out my life after graduation because I have a lot of questions regarding how to deal with frienships with different life transitions, what things like marriage and having kids can impact in the way your life is run, how to know if a career is right for you and how to advocate for yourself, how to know if someone is good to marry, and more. Being Alone on the Holidays I feel like the holidays often remind me on how I don't have a family I have warm fuzzy feelings around and this increased feeling of FOMO given that everyone around me seems to be celebrating with their family. I feel like growing up I had more of an outlet like when I was a kid and we did little Thanksgiving and Christmas parties in school. And I remember as a child trying to bring that home and my parents entertaining it but eventually when I got a little bit older, I kinda got the impression that they weren't really into it and that they were just going along with me because I was a child. I think having little plans around this time of year helps. I remember last year celebrating my friend's birthday, which is around Thanksgiving, and going to the little birthday dinner she has mitigated a lot of the isolation and lonliness I feel during this time of year. This year, I had that friend's birthday and I also spent some time with my boyfriend's family and I think that this helped Thanksgiving to not be depressing. I'm not sure how I'll handle this upcoming Christmas though. I guess we'll see lol but normally I find myself crying myself to sleep. It's that and New Years as well. But last year I didn't cry myself to sleep because I spent New Years with my friends instead of my family for once. Also, I find the feelings being exasserbated when I do spend the holidays around my family as opposed to being alone as I may imagine. As I'm writing these things out, I can't help but wonder how to "fix this" or if this is something that needs to be fixed in the first place. I think the feeling of being lonely during the holidays, lonely when I'm lacking the emotional resources to deal with a challenge, or lonely because I don't have a solid support system and I tend to put everything in one basket of frienship rather than distributing it between friends and family is a rational one. It makes sense why I feel emotionally neglected. Part of me thinks that this is just how life is for me as someone who doesn't have family to fall back on and when things come up that I will have to just sit with these feelings everytime which I don't think will impact my life greatly as me dealing with the feelings of emotional neglect isn't something that I feel constantly nor it is distressing enough to stop me from living a fairly well adjusted life. At the same time, there is a part of me that wants to handle this at the root and not have these periodic feelings come up in a predicatable fashion.

Thoughts on Advocacy These last couple of months I feel made me more aligned with my values, made me more sure of myself, and helped me combat a lot of my doomer tendencies. I want to open this post with something I said in a previous post. When it comes to activism, I feel like in the past when I was an angsty teenager fueled by YA dystopian novels I had kind of this romanticized idea about revolution and what that intails. I think that the Hunger Games convinced my 13 year old self that when I came of age that I would be able to over throw the government with my friends if shit hit the fan lol. As I got older and moved into my late teens, of course I started to have a more realistic view of things like revolution and recognize how chaotic and unpleasant it can be. But despite that, I would say that the angst intensified for a couple years after Trump became president. Like 16 to 18 year old me wanted to fuck something up real bad. Like many lefties, I think I had that fantasy of revolution but I think that shit came to a halt after the insurrection. And I would say that the doomer shit with late stage capitalism hit me from like 20 to 22 and it calmed down once I was able to secure decent employment (thought it still is in the back of my mind). But in the end of the day, I just wanted change for the better in a chaotic world that felt like was getting crazier. Perhaps the positive change will give meaning in these unprecendented (god I fucking hate that word) times and something to look forward to or at the very least, hope for resolve and order. During this genocide I started thinking about some of the stuff that the Human Rights department talked to us about when it came to any kind of activism work. I remember we had a conversation about how a lot of the things that we want to push for or build the foundation for is not something we will see in our time, whether that be wanting to enact change on campus and never seeing that change come into fruition until years after graduation, or that be in a larger real life scale where you advocate for a cause that doesn't come true until after you die. The example that we used on a smaller scale was how 5 ish years a go (mind you this was in 2019) that the campus was noted as one of the most homophobic colleges in the U.S. and now we have gay people running for (and in a couple years winning) a homecoming title. The students that set the foundation for this stuff have graduated years ago but people have carried it on and real change has happened to where this campus isn't nearly as hostile as it was towards gay people compared to in 2014. I think the lesson I took from that is a lesson of being detached from outcome, something that the life purpose course talkes about. You need to fight for something not because you think things are going to change or because you want to be the hero (*cough* *cough* savior complex *cough* *cough*), but simply because it's the right thing to do and because it is an authentic expression of your higher values. Because you never know. Things could change 10 days from now, 10 months from now, or it could be 10-100 years from now. Despite that, fighting for the right thing just because it is right gives you a more intrinsically motivated way of approaching activism that can keep you going. Palestine is a good example of this. There have been people advocating for rights for Palestinians for decades. And while public opinion didn't change much during those decades, it laid the groundwork for activism today where we've had a greater shift in public opinion in favor of Palestine in the past 2 months than the last 75 years. https://www.reuters.com/world/us-public-support-israel-drops-majority-backs-ceasefire-reutersipsos-2023-11-15/ I also thought about what advocacy looks like as well. I think a lot of people have this idea that advocacy takes form in a Katniss Everdeen style take over of the Capitol or great speeches of MLK Jr. and Malcom X. And sure, that's one aspect of it, but it certainly isn't the only one. Sometimes being an advocate means being a good friend to someone who has been impacted by such events and being there for people emotionally. Sometimes being an advocate means sharing information and boosting posts in an algorithm. Sometimes advocacy means having difficult conversations with the people who you're immediately connected to. Sometimes it's being quiet to take care of yourself and secure your future to make more change down the road and sometimes it means being loud not only for the victims of atrocities but for the supporters who are not in the position to say anything because it would jeopardize their entire lives. In the end of the day, we can only do what we can in the context of our lives, surroundings, and material conditions, but while it isn't productive to have a hyper individualistic view of advocacy and believe that you're going to be the big figure who makes change, it's important to not down play the little ways we show up because when they all accumulate together, the little things are the big things. I personally don't think I'm doing much to help this situation. Things look very grim. I feel quite silly reposting things on social media but I know that I've helped educate a small handful of people and I'm greatful for that. I normally don't think that social media advocay in the form of infographics does much but I do think that in this particular instance where there is a lot of misinformation and propoganda that sharing bite sized pieces of information articulating basic facts as well as on the ground footage of what's happening in Palestine is crucial in swaying public opnion (and it's working). I'm doing what I can and I'm not going to downplay the importance of that because I'm not doing it because I think there will be immediate change (though that would be nice) but because it is simply the right thing to do. This situation also really tests my patience and values because of how long it can take for change to trickle up from public opinion to representatives, especially given how much money is involved in PACs. I have made the active decision that I'm not going to go doomer on this or any other causes I care about and I'm going to continue doing what I can. And it's hard given all the suffering that takes place in the mean time. Sure, we have swayed public opinion over the last two months but Gazans continue to die from airstrikes, disease, and lack of food and water. And the notion of incremental change is difficult to stomach at the face of monumental destruction. I'm still not 100% sure how to handle that but I know that it isn't an excuse to get all doomer and use your sense of desensitization to act insensitvely or continue on with life as if nothing is happening. I'm going to end the post with this:

Emotional Processing Update: The Timeline of My Grief Part 2 November 5th: I met up with my friend and I went to the protest with her along with my boyfriend. I felt so much better after the protest because it made me realize that I wasn't alone. I was so happy with being able to talk about this in depth in person with my friend and I felt myself getting closer to her. I had fun hanging out with them that day and caring for my community felt like the greatest act of selfcare. There were also little drones flying overhead every now and then getting aerial footage. Later that night I saw posts from the protest incorporating the footage and I started crying alone in my bedroom. During the protest, my boyfriend lifted me up a little since I am 5'2" and can't see much and I wanted to see from a higher point of view quite literally. Seeing a little more did make me feel better but seeing the post later that night moved me to tears. I feel like we're all just one person and we're all doing our small part but even if we try to be lifted up (in my case quite literally), there is only so much we can see. But from a much higher perspective, all of these thing culminate and do create a difference even if in our day to day lives the actions we take feel very miniscule against larger systems and forces. We're all doing our little part and we're all showing up and it was nice to be in a community of people who gives a fuck after feeling crazy, alone, and isolated in where I stood over the past couple of weeks. It gave me a lot of fuzzy feelings lol. I think this alleviated a lot of my remaining anger and my feelings of disorientation. November 6th - November 10th: I was still irritated at work but at this point it started getting easier to get through the day. I started journalling again about this matter to further process and organize my thoughts on the matter. I have been talking to my friends more and I have been getting closer to them through my eagerness to support them emotionally and process this collective grief together. Stage wise I was in a place of reconciling and depression characterized with low energy and numbness. November 7th: I talked to my friend briefly who is Middle Eastern and who lives in DC because we finally go the time to talk amidst her crazy schedule and our grief. I have been anxious about how she's been doing for the past 3 weeks because I know things are crazy in DC and she has the most proximity to this situation than anyone else in my life. And given what I have been dealing with, I couldn't imagine what she was dealing with. I know she hasn't been doing well, but not talking to her was giving me a sense of anxiety because I really wanted to check up on her and how she's handling things. I really wanted to be there for her and the uncertainty was getting to me. I held it together when I started talking on the phone with her because I didn't want to focus the conversation on myself in the short window of time we had. And then I found out that she has a friend who is Palestinian who had family trapped in Gaza and how they were checking everyday to see if their family was still alive. Thankfully, by had I mean that later that day I got the notification that they were able to flee to Egypt since they had Canadian citizenship. But the fact that they were stuck there for a month is difficult for my friend and I to comprehend despite how real it felt. In the following days I kept thinking about how they are going to have to live with the events of that month for the rest of their lives. I felt a sense of shock and strong melancholy about this matter whenever I thought about it. November 11th-16th: I've still been feeling irritated with work but it was more so for work related reasons rather than genocide related ones. I was coping well. However, because work slowed down a bit I feel like I had room to relax a little more and let myself have the room be a depressed blob and feel everything. I had a little self care date with myself where I got myself boba after work and then took myself out to dinner. I felt like I was craving quality time with myself since in a normal situation where I'm alone I do get that quality time to myself but lately I've just been rotting in bed. I felt much better afterwards but there was a sense of guilt and shame in the background because I was getting my stupid little coffee while people didn't have water to drink. I dealt with a lot of the guilt and shame around having boundaries with how I engaged with the content and reconciling my feelings around self care at this time both in therapy and with my friend. It was nice to have a sanity check from the people around me who would keep my accountable but also let me know that I'm doing what I can in a reasonable way rather than what my inner critique was telling me about how I'm complicit and don't care. I feel like I dealt with the last bit of my anger during this time period but I still felt numb. November 17th-18th: I got some supplies together to make a poster and got started on it. I was going to go to my second protest. I had fun making the poster and it felt relaxing as I got the chance to think about more about how I've changed for the better from all of this. I felt myself go into the acceptance stage more starting now. I met with another friend at this time and talking about what's been going on lately helped. She told me that she was following my posts and that it helped her get educated on this matter and that it got her to go to the protest on November 5th. I know it's very little but it helped me feel like I was doing my little part and it helped me positively view the situation a little more. I think that helped the numbness to a certain extent. November 19th: I went to my second protest. I enjoyed the energy I was around and I got to talk to the other protestors. It started raining and I had an umbrella with me so I went up to another girl around my age who was waving around the Palestinian flag and shared the umbrella with her. We chanted together and created small talk with one another and shared what brought us here. A lot of people also liked my poster and took pictures and laughed about the little joke I put there. I also talked to a reporter briefly and felt proud of doing my little part. Later I met up with my friend who was in the area and we got coffee and talked about everything going on along with other things in our lives. It was a much needed vent session and I started talking about how I was dealing with things well but I didn't feel okay with being okay. November 20th-22nd: I went to therapy and talked about the depression and acceptance. I feel like it was a pretty productive session and I walked away feeling less in conflict with myself. Of course I still feel numb but I think there is more acceptance coming in. I'm still figuring out how to deal with the numbness. I got through work and was so ready for Thanksgiving so that I could enjoy a couple days off. I was counting done all month for this break. I also walked into a crime scene on the 21st where I saw the sight of a plane crash which was surreal. I'm planning on writing about that later. I felt a sense of shock that night regarding that specific situation as well as my proximity to violence this past year. I didn't want to go to work the next day but I forced myself to by telling myself that I was going to get off early that day any ways and that I just need to get through a few hours. November 23rd-November 24th: November 23rd wasThanksgiving day. I spent some of it with my family, my boyfriend's family, and my Middle Eastern friend as it was her birthday and she was back in town. It felt nice feeling like I was in community with others and I was really happy that I got to see my friend on her birthday despite the circumstances. I'm glad I got to check up on her in person. We got to talk more about what was going on and I got a better sense of where she was emotionally. The following day I didn't go Black Friday shopping despite needing to because I wanted to show my support for the Palestinian cause. It was suspicious that they did a "humanitarian pause" on the bombing just in time for Thanksgiving and Black Friday so that we as consumers can spend money guilt free. My boyfriend and I spent some time together watching the crazy people in the malls and the crowds and then we watched a movie together. And now I'm here journalling about all of this.

Emotional Processing Update: The Timeline of My Grief Part 1 October 7th: My boyfriend and I came back from a date when we had some really good food to my place where we cuddled and spent time together. He took out his phone and exclaimed that Hamas and Israel declared war on each other. I brushed this off in deflected, desensitized fashion from my knowledge that Israel and Palestine is a whole cluster fuck that has been going on for a century. I look back and I do think about how insensitive this was but I think this knee-jerk reaction was symptomatic of the first stage of denial. October 8th - October 14th: This was my denial and confusion stage as well as barginning because I was struggling to make meaning from this. Later it dipped into anger. Emotionally I was still living my best life and at times I was disengaged for a few days here and there. I was nevertheless making an effort to educate myself as this is a matter I was interested in and because this was impacting my friends. Later that week, the heaviness of the situation really hit me and so I moved from living my best life to being in this existential crisis mode. Work began being hard to get through because I felt like I couldn't stop and process my grief and because my inability to handle my grief was turning into a form of anger I took out on myself. It also felt so pointless and vapid. Social media was disorienting as I watched children being blown to bits juxtaposed next to people posting about their mundane lives and celebrities giving their unsolicited opinions on geopolitics. Not only was I dealing with difficult emotions, but I was beating myself up for not reacting in the "right way" because I was letting my feelings affect my quality of work and my ability to function. October 15th -19th: I did intend on discussing this matter with a friend who has more expertise on this subject both from personal experience and theoretical education. We originally thought we were going to talk on the phone but the whole thing was too overwhelming so I made a little slideshow so that she can read over it in her own pace. I got her seal of approval on my understanding of the subject and decided to start posting about it on my social media. I was itching to say something more publically because the feeling of complicity was very irritating because I felt like I wasn't being aligned with my values. It was still hard going to work and I was still emotionally beating myself up. I was very much in the anger stage here. October 20th-October 23rd: Durga Pujo was at this time and while I was able to celebrate and "act normal" I couldn't help but think about what the people in Palestine are going through at that time and how during every Ramadan the IDF goes around terrorizing them at their places of worship. I broke my silence on the matter publically and privately. I started posting things online now that I was confident in what I was talking about. I talked to a friend briefly about this and I checked in with my dad who survived a genocide himself. We both helped educate one another about situations such as this and he opened up more about his experiences. Things in my family have been weird since many of them are pro-Israel but it was nice knowing there was at least one person I could go to. My birthday was on the 22nd. Lunch with my family was weird because there was an elephant in the room that I didn't feel safe bringing up. I spent dinner with my boyfriend in a nice restaurant in downtown Dallas. I was able to enjoy myself but the events in Palestine were in the back of my mind. The following day on the 23rd I felt a really bad emotional crash. I had a good day the previous day because I disengaged for a brief moment only to find out the following day that it was one of the deadliest days up until that point. I guess I would say in these few days I was in the barginning stage as I was expressing more of my experiences as well as angry because I was still taking things out on myself. I would also say denial and avoidance was still here as well which manifested in me feeling somewhat disassociated during religious functions and feeling myself emotionally shut off at times. October 24th: I met with my therapist and I think that helped a lot in resolving the anger I had towards myself. Being gentle with myself alleviated a lot of the emotional pressure I was dealing with. I still felt angry about the notion of having to go to work as if nothing was happening and seeing people on social media posting as if everything was fine and dandy. I felt disoriented before because of the types of posts I was seeing online but I feel like starting from this date the disorientation was more front and center since I resolved the anger with myself. I knew where I stood so I wouldn't say I was confused and lost in the sauce in the disorientation rather it was the bargining stage of struggling to make meaning. October 25th - November 4th: I was still irritated constantly at work because of how pointless everything felt. I also felt depressed and I was really pushing myself to get through the day everyday. But most of all, I was frustrated with having to act like everything was normal and I felt isolated in my perspective. I would say that it was a mix of the anger and depression stages. I also felt kind of emotionally neglected at this time because I needed more human interaction but everyone was busy and I had a friend cancel on my last minute. I also talked to my cousin at this time and I felt like that conversation grounded me to where I was judging people and their online inaction less. There was also a sense of numbness and desensitization that was coming in at this time because of the amount of violent content I was consuming, thus making me fall deeper into a depression.

Emotional Processing Update: Being Okay with Being Okay It's been two weeks since I wrote on here about the Israeli Occupation and the genocide of Palestinians. I've mainly been busy trying to take care of my own life by doing my job and emotionally processing what has been going on and by being there for my friends who have closer proximity to this matter. Lately I have been feeling okay. I have been able to go to work without being constantly annoyed about being there. I have been able to carry on regular responsibilities without having a constant existential crisis. I haven't been crying myself to sleep and I still do feel pockets of joy in my days without having the force of numbness and guilt blunting that experience. All that being said, I can't say that I feel okay with feeling okay. While the stages of grief are by no means linear, I do think that this image above is good to include in this post to illustrate how I've been doing. Right now, I would say that I'm somewhere between depression and acceptance which is how I would characterize the "I'm feeling okay but I'm not sure if I'm okay with being okay" feeling. I feel like I have processed much of this emotionally but at the same time, unlike grief in a normal circumstnace with the death of a loved one for example, the event that this grief is coming from is something that is on going. The genocide isn't showing many signs of slowing down despite the "humanitarian pause" in these last couple of days due to Thanksgiving and Black Friday. There is a sense of ickiness that comes with my ability to emotionally process this and "move on" because it is an ongoing thing and people are still being killed. My brain is also desensitized by the images I have been seeing and when I see an image of a dead charred baby, my emotional responses don't kick in and as a result the *check engine light* goes off in my brain telling me that "Hey.... normalizing these types of things to where it becomes background noise to your life is not okay.... This is not a well adjusted way of reacting to such imagery.* It's like the "overwhelmed" aspect of the depression stage as indicated by the image above. While a part of me carries this guilt around regarding dealing with my silly life and self care, I believe this part of me does this because it doesn't want me to lose my sense of empathy, turn away from the situation, and be complicit. And I can honor that part of me without guilt tripping myself and by halting myself in the depression stage out of shame when I feel myself naturally moving on to the next state of acceptance. I was talking about all of this in therapy and I found it to be helpful to iterate that acceptance does not always equal to being satisfied with what is happening rather it's being able to acknowledge it and move forward in a healthier way. And since this is a spirituality forum, I think this point needs to be reiterated time and time again because sometimes we view acceptance from this lens of toxic positivity where if we have any negative emotion or desire to change things that it means that we are emotionally unevolved and unable to accept the divine creation of things. Something that helps me to counteract the numbness from the depression stage while moving into the acceptance stage without shame is acknowledging the postive things that have come from my life since October. I feel like I have become a softer, more empathetic person throughout all of this. I have shown up for my friends and my family who are being emotionally affected by this. I have learned how to be more gentle with myself and the standards that I can hold myself to. I have gained more humility in knowing that no matter how smart or well informed I or other people in my life can be, that we are not immune to propoganda. That has caused me to have more scrutiny towards my sources, my epistemology, my emotions and how it impacts my thinking process, and my ideologies. It also helped me empathize with people who fall prey to propoganda and how that can work since I feel like there was a part of me that would side eye people in the past for falling for such things. It has also helped me get clearer about my life and what I want to do, where my values lie when I have skin in the game, and how to navigate this in a more strategic way while recognizing where other people may be coming from in relation to what they can and can't do in this situation. I also feel like I've changed some of the preconceived notions I had about activism as well which is something I want to talk about more in it's own post. I still find it hard to find joy in things I liked before. Part of me thinks it's because I'm still in the depression stage of things but another part of me thinks it's just the way that I've changed as a person over the course of these last couple of months. I think back to how I've shifted as a person due to grief in the past and I can see some of those similarties this time around as well. I'm having trouble finding joy in working out or partaking in self-care / self development related activities. Part of it I can still see it as a depression thing but another part of it is me wanting to embrace a different form of self care/ self development / self actualization compared to what I have been doing because I'm outgrowing what I have been doing. I'm still trying to figure that bit out and I hope I can articulate this better later on but this is just where I'm at right now.

The Mundane is Anything But Mundane everyday life feels like anything but mundane. At times it feels like hell. At times it feels like heaven. At times it feels like I'm disassociating and I'm being disoriented. Mundane life can feel like hell because there is a genocide happening and I'm expected to carry on with life like it's nothing. I'm expected to put my head down and mind my own business because there is only so much I can do. And I want to be able to do so much more because it's a normal human reaction to want to help people you see who are suffering because human beings are social and community driven. But somehow we human beings have created some of the most inhumane systems that strips us from our most natural states because there are some mentally unwell, psychopathic, rich people who have isolated themselves from regular human beings and the human experience to where they built systems using their resources to continue benefiting themselves and their illness, while making other people ill along with them. Mundane life also feels like heaven. I have access to refreshing cold water, a fridge full of food, a warm bed, and safety from violence in my own home. I have friends and a good job. I'm able to support myself with little to no economic strain. And I'm constantly aware of how priviledged I am in my peace of mind well before this conflict. This is not a quality of life that should be exclusive to the priviledged. These are basic human rights. Guilt isn't the right word to explain what I'm feeling as I know it's not a productive emotion and can cut you off from empathizing with others and their situation by being consummed with your own shame and egocentricity. If anything, I feel that my sense of gratitude makes me want to advocate for others more so that they have the same quality of life as me. Finally, mundane life can also make me feel disoriented and disassociative. Social media has especially been weird. I'm like watching multiple videos of children being blown to bits and then the next video is about someone trying to link me to their Amazon storefront (listen I know you gotta pay rent and get the bag.... but what the actual fuck... Especially when the creator is like "RUN don't walk" about lipgloss). And then there is the occasional IDF thrist trap where soldiers are trying to make genocide out to be a fun girly time and AI images that are unapologetically janky and bad. Like I see some of the most unhinged stuff and I'm just stuck feeling like the *HUH* cat And also it's like I'm watching a genocide happening in real time on Instagram Live during my work hours while the people in my immediate life are either ignoring the situaiton or simply not talking about it either because they can't because their livlihoods would be at stake or because they are disassociating, or maybe it's because they genuinely don't give a fuck and would rather post about the Texas Rangers 20 different times. Like, why tf am I going online and watching other people's instagram stories and it looks like life is just going on like normal when it's anything but. I've felt this way about the pandemic as well before when I had to take a break from school. It felt like everyone elses lives were progressing and just going on like normal online and in person at my college because I was surrounded by priviledged rich white people whose experience during the pandemic was that it was simply a minor inconvenience rather than something that brought their lives to a screeching halt and caused death and distruction to their family and community. It's just hard for me to grasp that people can just go about their lives like nothing is happening, to see mundane life as just that instead of something radically different in these circumstances. Part of me feels a bit ashamed despite everything I wrote in my previous post on how cynicism and hardening your heart isn't the answer. I feel like there is this faux sense of maturity and rationality that comes from being cold and detached. It's the version of maturity and rationality under a white supremacist and patriarchial lens, where we hold nonreactivity and neutrality as the halmarks of enlightenment instead of acknowledging the validity in passion and emotions because that is seen as too girly and sensitive, or too animalistic and disruptive.

Cyncism and Desensitization I feel like the Palestinian genocide is really easy to get desensitized from and a variety of factors are at play. Violence in the Middle East is normalized to where people think it's the norm. Black and Brown people are dehumanized. We are living in a time where we are worn out from unprecedented times from pandemics, to the cost of living crisis, the insurrection, rise in facsism, mass shootings etc.... After continuously viewing violent content, part of your brain shuts off because there is only so much it can handle especially in late-stage capitalism where whether you like it or not, you're expected to carry on regardless of how you feel and where you are in processing grief. And I don't think you're a bad person to get desensitized because that's our brain's way of coping and surviving. However, just because you are numb and/or desensitized, that doesn't give you an excuse to be insensitive to other people who are still very much dealing with difficult emotions. It doesn't give you an excuse to be complacent and reinforce this as the status quo. It doesn't give you an excuse to check out mentally. Like it's one thing to pace yourself with the content you are consuming but it's another thing to just get off social media because you can't handle it. And I understand the necessity to take care of yourself and your mental health but you gotta ask yourself where is that coming from and to what extent your "mental health/self care" contributes to or goes against caring for your community. Because lets be real, there are real systemic issues at play and you can't self care and bubble bath and meditate your way out of the shitty feelings. If you want to get serious about mental health, you need to be serious about community care. Because there is only so much "coping" can do, even if it's in a healthy way, when the actual issue is not being addressed. Let's not employ some toxic positivity nonsense here. You should see these images and be disturbed. You should feel horrified at what's happening in the world and question what it is you're doing with your life. This should be depressing. And these negative emotions aren't symptoms of mental illness, because in order to be mentally ill, you need to be having irrational thoughts and reactions that you need to unpack in order to be functioning properly. These negative emotions aren't mental illness, they are a rational and empathetic reaction to a fucked up situation and they need to be felt and processed, and basically you need to do anything except turn your head and distract yourself from the situation at hand. Cynicism and sarcasm isn't revolutionary, it's the path of least resistance for edgy chan lords. It doesn't imply maturity or deep and abiding morality. Bravery is sincerity that comes from not letting the harshness of the world close you off from human connection. We don't have the luxury to be hopeless. Palestine sure doesn't. And while the violent imagery can humanize the suffering that is taking place, we need to be careful so that this desensitization doesn't turn these people, especially the journalists into background noise, or worse, a spectacle where they are auditioning for our empathy in the face of your priviledged hopelessness and cynicism.

Boycott Fatigue I saw a couple of posts of people talking about boycott fatigue and even more people talking about how boycott fatigue is absolute bs. And I just had some thoughts about it. I think it's valid for people to feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff they need to boycott. There is a long list of companies that support Israel and even if they don't support it, their parent company does or somewhere along their supply chain there is something fishy ethically. And imo, I feel like there is only so much boycotting can do since th alternatives also only do so much as far as harm reduction goes. Like I saw that Shein was pro-Palestine and I mean... I guess that's good but I'm not about to start shopping there because of their labor exploitation and their laundry list of issues. I know this is only one example but it leads me to the phrase "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism." What "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" means is that even if you are trying to do good, the system is pretty fucked and there is only so much good you can do in an unjust system that not only deinsentivizes ethical consumption, but sometimes doesn't give you ethical choices to begin with. Now, this phrase isn't intended to make people doomer and hopeless about the situation rather it is to make you more aware of the systemic situation rather than thinking that everything rests on your individual decisions and consumption. We are not going to consume our way out of capitalism and as a result, it's important to be more mindful of your consumption and take what you need instead of falling into hyper consumerism where you have like 5 different Stanley cups and you go feral about the newest iPhone. I get that we can't boycott everything and live in a forrest but decreasing your consumption is one way of living that helps. Like unfortuantely, we need electronics to function in society nowadays and we can't fully get rid of them because of the genocide in Congo which is largely happening because of cobalt mining. However, we can decrease our consumption by not buying new shit every year and make things stretch for years. At the same time, some of yall are mad annoying. It's one thing to feel overwhelmed by the long list of things to boycott because they support a genocide but it's another thing to be pressed because it's been 3 weeks since you got your chicken nuggies from McDonalds or your mediocre coffee from Starbucks. Like some people are really willing to support something but are so spineless to where their support wanes from a minor inconvenience. And honestly, that speaks to a lot of people's lack of integrity and self control. Like if you can't boycott 3 companies after it being narrowed down from 50 to make things easier and make the boycotts more focussed and effective especially when there are plenty of substitutes that are there for times when you really want to cave....I don't even know what to say other than y'all are the weakest link.

Materialism I wrote about a couple months ago about being in a more materialistic phase of my life. And I know it hasn't been super long since I was feeling this way and this phase feels a bit short lived but I think I can see myself exiting this sometime soon. I say this because I feel like I scratched most of my itches materialistically as far as my life style goes. I've got myself some new, nicer clothes I have been needing and some furniture for my apartment to fulfill my Pinterest perfect dreams. I also got more comfortable with spending money and keeping up with my expenses now that I know that I can effortlessly afford most of the things I want and need with plenty of savings left over. I generally have good mental health, friends, and a solid lifestyle in terms of taking care of myself. I eat good food that I'm satisfied with and I have a comfortable place to lay my head. My life on an individual level feels very close to perfect. Sure there are a couple things I would like to splurge on here and there but it isn't anything that I find myself lusting over if that makes sense. This is a thought that I've had for a few months but I feel like even though I have a happy life individually, it doesn't take long for me to notice my surroundings at large or at the lives of the people in my life that collectively times are fucking awful. And I think I feel this 10x more with the genocide that's happening. I have like 90% of everything that I could ever want at least materialistically speaking. And I wouldn't say I live super lavishly. I would say that I have a decent life style and peace of mind that everyone deserves to have however very few do. Not to be cliche, but that leaves me feeling kind of empty about the whole thing after a certain point. Sure, I get a lot of happiness and fulfillment from how I have my own place but I can't help but think of and see the growing homeless population for example and have that affect my individual sense of happiness. Work especially has been feeling particularly vapid. Granted I never had a fulfilling job in the first place even though it was something that allowed me to find fulfillment else where in my life via work life balance and it was something that came easy to me and that I was good at. It just feels so strange to be doing my pointless job and occassionally get yelled at by a client about check numbers while there is a genocide happening in an open air concentration camp. And no one acknowledges what is happening. I felt like I was denying a part of my humanity by trying to push through and continue on my regular life as if nothing is happening a couple weeks ago. I feel pretty unmotivated and annoyed at my job because of everything that is happening. And even though my job is such a big blessing, honestly, if I end up being let go because of the pro-Palestine posts I have been making, then so be it (I doubt that would happen knowing my work environment but I'm taking this hypothetical into consideration since I know of people who got warnings and/or got fired for saying things that were pro-Palestine). I don't want to work somewhere that doesn't align with my basic values even with all of the comforts and resources it provides because in the end of the day, the job I have is not something I want to do for the rest of my life and rather it is a stepping stone/ foundation of what I want to do later on which is something in journalism. And if I get let go now or I leave 2 ish years from now, it won't make a difference in so far of my general direction I want to take my life in (obviously I prefer to hold on for another couple of years to gain more stability but either way I will still be pushing for a transition industrially sooner or later). I don't regret structuring my life as such over the past year because I think the stability gave me a lot of peace of mind so that I can figure out what I want from life. But especially given what's happening right now and how I've scratched a lot of my materialistic itches already, I genuinely don't give a fuck of getting additional material comforts. Of course I think it's valid to advocate for myself so that i can maintain my current standard of living and continue putting money aside for investments and other financially responsible things but I don't care about making more money for anything beyond those reasons. I don't care about upgrading my life because I already feel materially fulfilled. The void I'm experiencing now isn't coming from my individual life rather it's coming from what's happening in the collective. It's coming from things that I can't self care and self improvement my way out of rather it's something I want to improve through my work and things I find fulfilling. I think this video ties a lot of these things together and I also want to do another post on this but I'm just going to leave this here for now.

Some Spiritual Thoughts I have been I suppose exercising a nondual train of thought because I feel like I resonates with it me an my values and because of how much peace and empathy it has brought me. I want to describe that a little bit more here today using the context of my processing of the Palestinian genocide. I wouldn't say that I have experienced god myself. I've just been trying this thing out for the past 2 years where I have taken some of the interesting ideas I have heard from Leo and from my class Understanding the Self: Eastern and Western Perspectives in regards to what God and Consciousness is and how I can embody that more. Nonduality and Consciousness We are all part of one consciousness and there is no separation between my consciousness and the consciousness of others. There is this illusion of separation, of duality, because nonduality is all encompassing, meaning it also contains duality as paradoxical as it can seem. The consciousness I have is no different than the consciousness of a Palestinian infant who has lost their family and is the sole survivor. It's no different from the IDF soldier posting thirst traps on TikTok. It's no different from the bystander in Germany who is going about life as if nothing is happening and it's no different from the consciousness of a person in the U.S. who has family in Gaza. And I think embodying this thought more allows me to view everyone as more human and even if they are not human still part of the same on consciousness, thus opening me up to more empathy and understanding because in the end of the day, it is all me. I am not my name, my body, the things I own, the things I experience, or the things I feel. All of that is relative to my material conditions. When you strip everything away, I am the consciousness. And if consciousness is God, I am God. And if consciousness is everything, then I am everything. And when you see yourself in everything, you walk with much more gentleness and empathy than if you were to separate yourself from creation. God is Everything If consciousness is in everything and everyone, and consciousness in each person is God's way of experiencing reality and his creation from infinite perspectives, why does god create atrocities like genocide? It's because consciousness, unlike ego, isn't motivated by survival as it know it's infinite. God created the Palestinian mother who lost everything because it wants to know what it's like to live that life from it's very conception to it's very end to fully understand and embody it. It's also how God becomes/is all knowing, because God lives in all perspectives. It's hard for our human ego to imagine why God would let such atrocities happen and let creation suffer as so because even the best of us have great difficulty to abandon survival fully to where we would be content being bombed indiscriminately in the same way that it's content living in a luxury penthouse apartment. God's desire to experience has no bounds because in nonduality all there is is consciousness. and therfore it embodies infinite forms of love. And if God is everything and is infinite, meaning it is boundless, there is nothing stopping it from creating boundaries and challenges, and individual egos. God loves the mass shooter and wants to experience reality from it's perspective in the same way that God has boundless love towards the victims of the shooting. To love is to take the interest of another as your own and the deepest way to do that is embodiment. And because God is infinite love, it loves even the ugliest parts of existance that is hard for any regular person's ego to accept, much less embody. Reincarnation And the whole bit about how when we die and consciousness stops, there might be a void but since there is nothing else to do, God comes back and continues to experience and embody infinite forms of consciousness, I believe explains reincarnation as well. I believe that it explains reincarnation in a nonlinear way. I might be soos_mite_ah in this life but maybe in my next life I'll be Harriet Tubman. Maybe in my next life I will be born as my mother, my best friend, or maybe a random person 500 years into the future. God will eventually experience every life and then keep doing it tenfold for an infinite amount of times for an infinite duration of time. And this experiences how God is all knowing as well because God has experience every perspective. For example, I can crack open a history book and know the general life story of Harriet Tubman from the point of view that consciousness is experiencing from soos_mite_ah. When consciousness is experiencing Harriet Tubman, it won't know her whole life story from beginnning to end as it did in its past life it experienced centuries into the future. But it will know the day to day minutia and embody the experiences that Harriet Tubman had from birth to death and even the forgotten points in between. Consciousness is all knowing because it has experienced Harriet Tubman for example in everyway possible. Everything in linear time has already happened and is happening simultaneously. It just doesn't seem so because of the way consciousness limits itself to take everything in. I bring this up because I guess a nondual practice I have to experience more empathy is to imagine that everyone I meet is a different part of consciousness and that I have experienced or yet to experience consciousness from their perspective. The thousands of people who have died in Gaza are a thousand different past or future lives my consciousness has experienced. And I imagine it as if I am the one who experienced these first hand atrocities, one because on a certain level I have, but two it helps my ego exercise a nondual mindset. And if that empathy feels like it's too much to bear and that it's too painful and horrific, I remind myself that God wanted to experience this from a high level because God isn't as limited as I, the ego, am with the desire for comfort and safety. And this experience gives me a visceral experience of empathy followed by a sense of peace where even though I haven't embodied God's love, that I get it to a certain extent theoretically. It's very humbling and grounding I would say. The whole point of life is to experience and that is exactly what consciousness does indiscriminantly. And the more we align ourself to fully experience, the good, bad the ugly, and fully embody both being completely present to where we even accept the experiences we have where we're not present, the less resistance we face because we are in line with the one fact in the universe, that consciousness is everything and is here to experience everything. I really hope all of this doesn't sound like spiritual rambling.

My Understanding of What is Going On I had a rough idea as to what was going on in Palestine from my classes, specifically in my human rights classes, but I wouldn't say that I was well versed in it. I made much more of an effort in figuring out what was happening and I discussed this matter with a friend who specialized in this region as an international relations major. I got her seal of approval and I think I have a decent grasp as to what is happening right now. I made a little slide show since my friend and I didn't have much time to talk this out. That way she could take in the info in her own time and then give me feed back accordingly. I shared this with others and basically I think this is straight forward and easy to understand so I wanted to include it in my journal (also, I'm proud of my work). But unfortunately, I don't have enough space left in my attachments to add this file to my journal so I'm going to try to improvize. What about the U.S.: The U.S. gives Israel billions to fund their military. But why? The far right religious nut cases believe that having Jewish people in the Promise Land will bring the rapture and the second coming of Christ sooner. The Democrats love saying that “it’s complicated” in order to continue protecting their hegemony in the Middle East Both parties treat Israel as a giant military base and pawn to negotiate with other middle eastern countries for “strategic military and economic reasons.” No bitch, it’s imperialism. They love saying that they are doing this to preserve Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East but let’s be real, it’s a lie to make us feel better about ourselves and make us look like we care about the well being of the people around us when we clearly don’t given the way Palestinians are treated. Plus, it’s not our place to impose our standard of government to other people as that can cause even more instability in an area. We are not the world’s police force Basically, the U.S. is the hot Cheeto girl of the international community who loves to pick fights at 7:55 am after guzzling Brisk Lemonade. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J7wlUtrxZc) See unlike Cassie (Israel), Maddie (the U.S.) still has friends. Those friends are afraid of the U.S. to a certain degree because they know how volatile the U.S. can be and don’t want to get on their bad side. No one likes Cassie but the other countries keep their mouths shut because or else that’s like social suicide. Everyone talks shit about Cassie amongst themselves because Cassie is a messy bitch. The Rhetoric: Genocidal Rhetoric Genocidal Sentiments: Note, while there are genocidal sentiments on both sides, this isn’t some all lives matter shit. Israel is significantly more powerful because of global backing and military power therefore they harbor most of the responsibility Genocidal Rhetoric: Palestine Palestine : After being subjected to violence and a lack of food, water, and electricity and general instability, it’s understandable that some Palestinians have wanted to retaliate against Israel. When you have been destabilized for so long and you have seen generations worth of violence, you become desensitized to it and it becomes a valid way of dealing with your problems because that’s what’s been modeled to you and you have already lost so much to where sacrificing yourself and killing others doesn’t seem like a big deal. Enter Hamas: When some people get so desperate and feel so powerless, they resort to joining terrorist groups and adopting extremist forms of religion as a way to gain back a sense of control. Hamas is not a group of principled freedom fighters, they are terrorists and they also terrorize Palestinians. They are an Islamofacist group. Israel loves Hamas because it helps the villainize and further demonize/dehumanize the Palestinian civilians and it emboldens the Israeli far right. There have been other groups that have tried to help Palestine by using more moderate and secular means, but they have been destroyed and bombed. However, Israel kept Hamas around because they are easy to blame and because it will hurt the optics of Palestanian liberation if that liberation gets conflated with a terrorist group Basically, messy bitches love other messy bitches so that they can set each other up and not people who are actually trying to help in a constructive because nonmessy people won’t play stupid games to win stupid prizes. Genocidal Rhetoric: Israel Israel has also been subjected to violence though not in the same scale as Palestinians. The Israeli citizens aren’t inherently genocidal monsters rather they have been subjected to decades of right wing propaganda. Israeli citizens are also required to serve in the IDF for two years and this further reinforces the need to militarize and contribute to the cause for every citizen. It reinforces the propaganda. There is also a whole thing with birth right trips that are funded by the state which are basically indoctrination vacations to draw people in for the relocation / settler projects to further displace Palestinians The Israeli government loves to conflate Jewish people with Zionism and Israel. Therefore, if you make any critiques, you’re labeled as an anti-semite because critiquing them = critiquing all Jewish people They also want to conflate all Palestinians with Hamas to justify the slaughter. They are willing to frame the murder of civilians as them fighting through a human shield. This makes the citizens seem like an extension of Hamas and absolves the IDF of any responsibility of killing people because it’s framed as if it’s Hamas’s fault that these citizens were in the line of fire even though they were intending to go in and murder civilians anyway. The killing is framed as a necessary evil or it’s framed as something Hamas did to Palestine. You can be pro-Palestine Liberation and not support Hamas. Killing civilians is never ok for either side. It’s one thing if a civilian is in the line of fire but it’s another thing to target civilians specifically. This is to both Hamas and IDF. I’m not going to be cherry picking who my critique applies to What Hamas did was fucked up and using the name of revolution for some men to enact their sick and twisted rape fantasies is taking the revolution’s name in vain. It also emboldens Israel’s far right and it isn’t surprising that Israel is acting the way they are given their track record. The Palestinian people don’t deserve to suffer because of Hamas and we need to focus on the genocide that is taking place now rather than hyperfocusing on Hamas. Hyperfocusing on Hamas and not having any systemic critique does more harm than good in terms of Palestinian support and further strengthens Islamophobic sentiments. It made me uncomfortable when people tried to frame the initial atrocities that Hamas committed as an example of Palestinians fighting for freedom. This is because Palestinians deserve better than Hamas, an Islamofacist terrorist group, and because the Israeli government loves shit like this because it strengthens their propaganda and support for genocide as we are seeing now. I’m upset that I’m right about this but I’m glad I didn’t jump the band wagon of misinformed advocacy early on because I think a lot of Americans didn’t know what Hamas was or what they were supporting but knew that they didn’t like the state of Israel and colonization. This specific point is for all of the people who were trying to justify killing, raping, and taking Israeli citizens as hostages as “you can’t tell indigenous people how to fight oppression and express how they are unheard.” I agree with that but it doesn’t mean that you take it out on CIVILLIANS. Combatants and soldiers, yes but not civilians. You can criticize Israel and Zionism without being hateful towards Jews. Because people can’t grasp these points, there have been hate crimes towards Jewish people and Muslims in the U.S. and people saying all types of dumb shit because of how liberal identity politics hyper focusses on religion rather than looking at the material conditions and ideologies of each parties. There are also a group of Nazis that just like Zionists, conflate all Jewish people and Zionism and the state of Israel as a way to demonize Jewish people. There are also Nazis that love Israel because the concept of an ethnostate and genocide appeals to them. It’s Anti-Semetic to assume all Jewish people are Zionists in the same way that it’s Islamophobic to assume all Muslim people are jihadists/terrorists/Islamofacists. The Rhetoric: Religious Conflict: Religious conflict are rarely solely about religious text alone. It usually has to do with colonialism. The conflict between Northern and Southern Ireland are often framed as a conflict between Protestants and Catholics. It however originated from British colonization and was a territorial dispute. The Hindu and Muslim conflict in South Asia (Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh) has its roots to British colonization and how the British tried to divide and conquer the population so that they won’t rise up against the colonization. Similarly, the Israeli Occupation is due to the U.K. not knowing how to mind their own business. You don’t need to understand the details of the religious doctrine (if anything that can potentially cause you lose the forest for the trees). You need to understand the power dynamics that are involved. The Rhetoric: Religious Nationalism: So Israel and India are besties because they both hate Muslim people and because they have similar ideologies regarding religious nationalism. Wanting a homeland for their religious group and kick everyone else out. Honest to god, just die mad about it. That’s my stance. Like I’m sorry you don’t have a homeland but you can’t just kick people out and ethnically cleanse them. I don't care what you went through, no one deserves an ethnostate Painting this as a conflict that has been going on for centuries even though this isn’t accurate. This makes the conflict seem inherent thus causing people to not try to resolve it thus reinforcing the status quo. They also want you to forget about the past where people got along because that will conflict with their world view and how people can move past such differences. They overemphasize religious differences and segregate communities so that it’s easier to pit people against each other and ignore the real problem which is colonialism. Segregation aids in dehumanization because if you aren’t seeing a population face to face, it’s easier to paint narratives about the people you are segregated from since you aren’t interacting with them regularly and see that they are just like every other person you come across. They continue to paint themselves as the victims even though they have most of the power in the dynamic (though this isn’t a religious nationalism thing, it’s a fascism thing generally speaking). bUT iT’S comPliCaTEd!!!! : Yes and No No it’s not complicated: We insist on complicating things in the U.S. so that people can shut down and because things get complicated when you try to mix the U.S. messy self interest and try to fulfill that while reconciling the occupation. It’s kind of like when Cassie was being held accountable for fucking Nate but she kept saying that “it’s complicated” and “we weren’t girl friend and boyfriend” in order to make herself look and feel better. You can spin this however you want but the fact of the matter is that Gaza have been cut off from food, water and electricity and thousands have died from bombs and the people have nowhere left to go other than to die from the explosions or die from a lack of food and water. Hamas has left the chat and now innocent civilians who cannot fight back are paying the price. This isn’t a war because you need two combatting sides. Israel is the aggressor and they are committing a genocide right now. It’s not morally complicated. Genocide is bad. Colonization and displacement is bad. But because there is a lot of pro-Israeli propaganda, the media makes it difficult to frame this situation as colonization and loves to paint any anti-Zionists as Anti-semetic, thus shutting down all critique and making the clear facts blurry. While this isn’t a morally complicated, yes this situation is logistically complicated when it comes to solutions. Previously there was a debate between a one state solution, where the area is all one country, and a two state solution where you have an Israel and a Palestine. The two state solution is obviously not working since Israel is committing war crimes. The one state solution poses additional challenges on how to structure the government after the intervention, where the settlers will go (since especially if they were born there and Israel is all they know it’s fucked up to tell them to leave), where will the Palestinians go, and how tf everyone will live together with all of the genocidal rhetoric going on. You don’t want to integrate Palestinians into a burning house full of Zionists where they will be hate-crimed on the daily. Also fascism is a problem. While I’m not super well versed in the international relations in the Middle East, I’m sure whatever solution that is proposed has its own power dynamic shifts to take into consideration that are legitimate and aren’t rooted in U.S. or imperial self interests.

Palestine I'm going to have a series of post on Palestine in this journal. I have a bunch of things I want to write about and I jotted it down in a sticky note and I'm going to write about it while probably adding more to the list since this is an on going thing.

What about gay people lol? Also if I were to compare myself to when I was single to now since I've been in a relationship, I wouldn't say that I felt more like a woman since enterring the relationship. I do agree that hyper independence can be a problem and that it's natural to want to have human connection, platonic or otherwise. But I wouldn't say that being in a romantic relationship is somehow more gender affirming lol.