Tell me how you really feel.
An old friend and coworker told me not long ago, “you’d be alright if not for your mental health issues.” I don’t know what he meant by that. We no longer speak.
There’s been a few times in my life where friends have expressed this to me. “You’d be cool if you weren’t crazy” is textbook bias. I don’t even know where they got off saying it.
A word of advice from a mental patient.
Don’t tell folks with mental illness this if you like them and want to be their friend. Only say it if you never wish to speak to them again. That’s what you get with me.
What if I told a black dude, “damn man, if only you weren’t black.” Bias. How about my Mexican friends, “damn if y’all weren’t Mexican and spoke English,” bias too. Some folks think they can’t be friends with women because they can’t keep their dick in their pants. Guess what, not women’s problem, dude. (Always a dude).
Blame me for mental illness all you want. I don’t care. I don’t generally talk to folks who think I’d be cool if I wasn’t bipolar. It’s because I am bipolar. And I’m still cool. Ha.
The bias here, nuts.
Tons of folks out there harbor bias and don’t even know it. It comes out when you say this stuff. It doesn’t feel good. It often feels like betrayal. Hard for me to get over these days. They could be fucking nazi-types. How am I supposed to know when they say horrendously biased stuff like, “you’d be pretty cool if not for the mental illness stuff?”
Bias is a tool for the bad guys.
If we want to team up and get rid of the bad guys, we need to stop being cruel to the good guys. Whose side do you think patients are on? The ones increasing health care costs and decreasing coverage? It just might be you need some crazy folks on your team. There’s loads of us. Around 22 percent or so of the population here are mental patients. You really want to do this without all of us? You act like you do when you say that shit. Which is to say, you act a lot like them.
Important.
From the perspective of this mental patient, bias on both sides sounds the same. It is. Democrat bias is no better than Republican bias. They sound exactly the same.
My experience
Before Dems online knew I was a mental patient, I got bias for being a big white dude in Texas. During the election I was called names by Dems, not MAGAs, for asking questions. I was told “shut up vote blue,” countless times. I was told “you get what you vote for in Texas.” I was told “secede already.” You see, the blue team is diseased as much as the red team. Bias.
Bias is an easy mode.
I don’t know what to do about being one of the only people I know who knows it’s wrong and is trying not to do it. It’s a lonely sport at the moment. A lot like tennis. Bias isn’t hard, it’s easy. That’s why folks do it. The USA isn’t just dumb. It’s lazy.
Why are we so tired?
So many folks I talk to one on one know what’s right, they just don’t have the energy for it. I talk about being worn out by constant messages. They’re linked. When I quit social media, energy went through the roof. Maybe folks would have energy for doing something if they weren’t already doing something all the time. Just guessing.
Social media is tiresome. (I know).
We aren’t all tired and cranky unless that’s the message from social media. Then, I suppose we could be. My experience. Don’t shoot the messenger big white mental patient from Texas. Just unplug.
Social Media fosters your biases. Nurtures them. It even gives validation for them. The longer you go without it, the more you actually like people, at least that’s my experience.
The big lie of the 2010’s.
When you’re on social media, they make you think you’re keeping in touch, but they’re really collecting your preferences for their paying customers. It’s not for keeping tabs on folks, it’s just designed to appear that way. It’s actually wearing you out with dozens of tiny decisions per minute. Not like a person would, more like a survey. That’s work. Why give them that? Who has that kind of time or energy?
Changing our reality involves changing social media, unfortunately.
If we want to change the place, I don’t see how social media stays the same. We should be willing to change that too. We need it to move away from nurturing bias. I suggest a focus on nurturing correspondence and empathy.
The pickle.
We’re in a real pickle. Unless folks actually make changes en masse, the bad guys get their way. They count on us doing nothing. Doesn’t that piss you off?
return to home.
