betterhelp myself to some of this dysfunction money
BDSM-5: mental illness...for da freaky deaky mfs
while “euphoria” went quadruple platinum in my eardrums, “not like us” created a new element altogether
out: in a k-hole. in: “in percatory.”
we’re not only so back, we’re so looney tunes back in action
“please please please don’t hesitate to keep it to yourself”
new band name: yapanese breakfast
been telling Kendrick fans they missed an entendre (they didn’t hehehe)
drake: “so you can’t uno reverse the freaky man allegations then drop a draw 4 misunderstood album reference about generational trauma? this some bullshit, whose house rules are these?”
what, you think i’m not gonna talk to the dog like it’s a human? fuck outta here
right before bed thought last night: I should’ve called that anime shorty in high school who got mono on the second day of sophomore year “princess mononucleosis” — stupid, dumb, didn’t lock in hard enough, ugh, ok, good night
“block block block! heal heal heal!” the investments in dysfunction
i’m tight that I didn’t call this series The Mental Breakdown Breakdown (Kendrick got me thinking in double entendrenese).
“who will we be when everything is healed?”
“when will this constant carousel of trauma end?”
“will i ever be fixed?”
questions keeps me up at night fr fr. and it’s ones that keeps the healing industries around therapy going, too.
i’m not anti-therapy. i’m anti-exploitation, both by those industries and the people who manipulate and weaponize therapy, abuse, and healing language to control others.
dysfunction is natural and normal. people will fall into functional periods and dysfunctional ones — sometimes it’ll be the environment, relationship, or space not being a good fit and sometimes it’s us forcing ourselves into things we don’t fit into. if dysfunction repeats itself, we got ourselves a pattern and if that pattern becomes unbreakable, unbearable, or harmful that’s where intervention is needed — and therapy works best here.
therapy historically was seen as an extreme step when things got overwhelming; life keeps on lifing and grief, trauma, childhoods, deep stressors, etc all had a safe space to be explored, dissected, and recovered from. but what started as a break-in-case-of-emergency psychological option became the first line of defense.
what does that say about our culture? what does that say about our abilities to navigate the spectrum of pain? are we all in a constant state of overwhelm? “who will we be when everything is healed?” “when will this constant carousel of trauma end?” “will we ever be fixed?
who’s profiting off of emotional labor?
i love to help friends find the language for the psychological torment that they might be experiencing. i find myself being the bridge for this in so many ways and i find it very rewarding, finding an emotional depth and connection with my community. i’m lucky to say i’ve found reciprocity in these relationships which doubles that reward.
i’ve also had terrible boundaries in the past — let people walk all over me, call to trauma dump, i’ve cross the city to sit on a couch for 6 hours and patiently wait for someone to be ready to talk about what they need to, etc. this never felt good to admit but i often knew i was being used as a sentient mirror, an acme “shoulder to cry on,” a first responder and knew that i couldn’t use this friend the same way they used me. it wasn’t reciprocal and once they figured out their thing (or i did), our relationship as friends or partners would fizzle out.
this felt like thankless work and i was complicit in never calling it out, leaving these relationships emotionally spent and betrayed (both by them and myself).
“emotional labor” took off a few years ago as a term about doing the heavy lifting for someone’s edification, feelings, or sensitivities. it felt gross as a term to me — as if capitalism had wormed it’s way directly into our amygdala and prefrontal cortices (as if it wasn’t already there). people started treating it like contractual work and collectively we worked till burnout to clock in to be there for one another, sometimes reaching a “friendship quiet quitting” level where we never addressed the imbalances.
“too much emotional labor” and “i don’t want to do that emotional labor” and “here’s my venmo — pay me for my emotional labor. don’t forget to add a tip” are all real deal things i’ve heard first-hand and second-hand.
obviously, we’re all at our limit — we ain’t got social services, social security gonna go away, everyone has commodified all of their hobbies, and rather than turn to each other as the salve and solve for the trials and tribulations of everyday life, we’ve outsourced even the most basic community activities to, you guessed it, therapy.
once again, not against therapy — help is help is help is help. but what has changed materially in our lives? is it constant grief vs intermittent grief? is everyone crazy and we have to go to therapy to find sanity one hour a week? is it the lack of “third spaces?” is it a global decline in trust in one another?
in my opinion, it could be any (and potentially all) of these factors.
there’s been a general decline in reciprocity in community spaces to hold issues
people put big stakes in “winning” or “losing” even the most basic social interaction
fake experts over-diagnosing with no experience outside of building individual subjective truths OR living out what they should have done in their situation through someone else
too many metrics for microinteractions to foment distrust, insecurity, feelings of worth (likes, retweets, who’s following who, checking in on people we shouldn’t/wouldn’t have had access to in the past)
people misuse the word community to mean “anyone who agrees with me” and fall back to carceral and punishment based logics with no accountability for the misuse
we have lost our ability to discern conflict, harm, abuse, and malignant danger by collapsing everything into “are they with me or against me?”
the goal of therapy is to get back into the swing of life as an active participant — not to rebuild the world in your image, with your rules. that might seem bombastic and callous but like i said in previous letter, don’t we all know people who are “in therapy” but it seems like they’re moving mad in the world still? don’t do the free trial, fam — get Therapy Premium+ without ads, see if you can bundle hulu (ooh, slide me the password?)
community is hard to come by but it’s even harder to come by if we spend one hour of therapy as either our true selves (or simply gossiping recklessly, venting, telling one-sided stories) and every other hour performing being okay when we aren’t. community accepts you as you are, past, present, and healthier future with a full range of emotional depth — not just at your best or at what you can do for them socially, professionally, romantically, etc.
why am i going so hard about this? well,Ii firmly believe we are being exploited due to our broken abilities to connect to our communities.
a vulnerable, fragile, easily manipulated society at their wits end trying to find answers? as a population right now, we are a lick.
where there is money to be made, it will be made. i believe that while we need to answer life’s big questions and a safe solitary space to work through it, we also need to keep a weather eye on all of the money that can be made off of our pain, trauma, etc (“weather eye” — bro thinks he’s a pirate of the caribbean)
getting the sonic rings knocked out of you week to week
getting pretty intro psych here but check out maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
in a world where we’re on a subscription model for almost everything, go through and think about a service that offers one of these things (use promo code “live” for 10% off your next purchase!)
basic physiological needs: air’s polluted, places all over don’t have clean water, how many homeless in the world with no where to put their head, mad vintage spots, not enough clothes for the homeless, and reproductive rights recently had to kill a law in arizona from the 1800s — these needs aren’t met.
safety needs: no one feels safe, everyone’s on edge, trust is at an all time low, where are the jobs (no, seriously send me one), what resources, health insurance these days is just “be careful,” mad people can’t afford a house — these needs aren’t met
in therapy, i’m sure a conversation about anything in this pyramid is fair game but the top three — love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization — seem to be swimming in a scrooge mcduck style pool together because these are ripe for exploitation:
love and belonging: all these reality shows to find love, docs about people being scammed during a period where they were emotionally vulnerable, all these dating apps, shows about couples therapy, found family, etc, all these movies about a parent just admitting they were wrong once — if you feel alone, therapy can fix you!
esteem: everyone’s reputation is on a social credit score of followers and following, performing being okay and good online while perhaps being in shambles on the inside, “the world is on fire and if I don’t say anything, i’m part of the problem,” camps where men go to feel like men, hustle culture, linkedin culture — we all want to be seen as a good person and where else but therapy!
self-actualization: everything on this pyramid can fluctuate or chip off at any time causing the road to actualization to be longer as we go to fix those things — so what’s stopping you from being your true self? therapy can help!
so much of this pyramid comes from a safe and healthy community, with resources and social structures to help us all feel actualized, respected, cared for, safe, and have our basic needs met — we’re not going to find them in therapy alone. and if the world doesn’t provide this to us, we’re not going to take this on one at a time. we gotta do it together (cue avengers theme).
said it once, i’ll say it again: we don’t need to individualize our suffering we need revolution.
i’m noticing more betterhelp ads, more alma ads, more people switching their cocktails of drugs to function within the social dysfunction as opposed to rebel against it. i’m seeing people switch therapists because they aren’t agreed with. i’m seeing therapists quit because they are holding our collective psyche together like spider-man with the train.
i’m seeing investments in dysfunction because it’s recognizable, because it’s “safe,” because it’s easier than fighting back, and/or people can use the dysfunction to their benefit (keep being bad, holding onto a narrative, etc).
this puts us all on a slow drip IV of psychological intervention when we should be using therapy to build psychological resolve, emotional depth and maturity, and conflict cardio to be able to exist in the world with our peers. this feels too simplistic but this is The Work™️ — this is how we all can become actualized rather than socializing the fucking around and privatizing the finding out (and vice versa, shit).
every millisecond of our time is spent trying to survive and there’s no time to live — not the first to say it, won’t be the last. time is the difference between a reaction and a response; a reaction is human and natural but uninformed and a response is reclaiming our time and taking inventory of a full picture. i’m just trying to paint a fuller picture of where therapy and psychiatric intervention should exist in community care.
how do i pull my stocks out of Big Dysfunction™️?
i don’t have all the answers, shit! it’s something we gotta do collectively.
just for clarity’s sake, i don’t wanna make people “normal” or “simply functional.” i want people to have more of an investment in each other as people and not just characters (real or one projected onto each other). therapy is a tool but not the whole solve.
here are phenomena i feel like we should at the very least interrogate:
self-care industry is booming…but who pays?
i'm not saying don't care about yourself! but ever since the soft life/self-care movement has taken off, it is now a 1.5 trillion dollar industry completely hell-bent on caring about the self and disconnecting from the vague “toxicity” of the world. is there toxicity? sure! but them anti-toxicity creams and spa day passes are increasing, ain’t they? them subscription boxes punching y’all in the purse, huh? protecting your peace is important but don’t turn your soft life into solitary confinement! maybe do a self-care night with others — many do but invite someone who might not be taking care of themselves to a regular event. who knows if this opens up an emotional pressure valve.
[note: i'm very fortunate to have friends where we can just sit down and be like “hey do you have a moment to talk about something serious” or “is there something off/something we should work through together” y’all niggas keep me young. if you can, have time set aside to talk about specific relationship dynamics, do it. it’s like maintenance on a car for longevity — self-care and others-care]
rethinking how we approach conversations about relationships
self-care can become “if it’s not about me, i don’t care” very easily if unchecked — that’s where that self-centered ignorance and blindness to others’ pain can re-root itself and grow, repackaged yet recognizable. look at gaza and the plight of the palestinian people — yes, it’s the macro but we do it on the micro too.
there is so much cultural and tribal supremacism tied in our activism right now — survival and thriving does not need to oppress the oppressor, don't make me tap the audre lorde sign. to tap into the correlation is not causation sign; there are male victims of sexual assault, there are victims of racism who are not just black, there are girlbossses who are just as toxic as men, there are gays who are racist, there are lesbians who parade toxic masculinity — these people fall through the cracks because we have our own stereotypes about our relationships to them and their relationships to each other. where do i get this info? hack comedians.
i did stand up for about 10 years before taking an extended hiatus and even then, i was DJing in the background. i have seen so many different standup sets and i have seen the same dysfunction we played off as jokes one for me it's like "can't you see you're the center of that story and the problem?” men be like, women be like — shut the fuck up! find a different angle, have an original thought! we living in a hack renaissance; plain vanilla hack, there’s black hack, immigrant hack, gay hack, straight hack, sexual hack — these jokes and philosophies do have an audience but even that’s entering a twilight era (dear god i hope so, i will set the sun myself if i have to).
just make sure that we’re not making it harder to seek help and community because we’re running windows 95 logic about each other in present day.
[note: there was a person who told a joke about dating five white rappers — my sibling in christ, you did that. you collected five white rappers (somehow both an endangered species and there’s too many) and they’re the problems? sound like this comedian wanted blackness but in lacroix form]
“ahh no — you got some passiveness in my aggressiveness!”
if there was one thing I could shout from the rafters it would be that passive aggressiveness is a tool of manipulation and a perfect breeding ground for gaslighting and abuse — full stop. we have a culture of conflict avoidance — a very fuck around culture where no one wants to find out. conflict is healthy, not all conflict will kill you, and there are healthy ways to navigate it.
passive-aggressiveness is a tool of social dysfunction that appears in coded ways and explicit ones where we aren’t direct and in that oblique approach, that grey area becomes a place where resentment can grow. My one worry is that therapy, while a good tool, has become a place where we go to vent about conflicts and never go back to fix them — therapy is a wonderful place to figure out our feelings about things but the real world is where we have to go and repair in order to live as harmoniously as possible.
collapsing definitions of specific phenomena into vague generalizations is dangerous. talking to everyone but the sources of a conflict is not creating safety. using diagnoses as a sword and shield to preserve unhealthy power dynamics is manipulative. scapegoating blindly and recklessly is unhelpful
find a way to be direct, specific, and curious — indirectness, general vagueries, and immovable perspectives make whatever softer world we want harder to create and navigate. obviously, there may be some issues but it’s a muscle that requires strength of patience, actually marinating in some trauma informed literature, common sense cardio, and core strength — yes, mental pilates, get after It.
spot the ones with the gift of the grift
a lot of “healing journey” shaun kings out there. where there is pain, there should be care but these people can hide a lick under layers and layers of ally-coded, peaceful, fake astrology (but not the one you believe, of course), holistic bullshit.
there are real healers out there and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference or vet. do the research, read the comments, hop on reddit, talk to a trusted friend — do not get finessed into “LaCrayuhasca" with Bethany” in gentrified white woman with dreadlocks brooklyn because the pun game was on point.
healing journeys don’t have to be solitary endeavors — frodo had 8 other people with him to get rid of that ring and my son sam was the realest homie out. put your faith in people and not opportunists peddling promo codes and pre-packaged empty promises.
if there’s money to be made, people will find a way to make it — niggas will shoot you and then drive you in their uber to the hospital to get the bullet out if there’s a bag in it. go on your healing journey but hopefully it leads you back to a healthy community and away from patterns and behaviors that keep you static.
not everything is therapy ready trauma
this is controversial but i still don't know how we went from therapy as the most extreme form of psychological care to making it a first aid kit for all of life's problems — some shit needs to simply be dealt with with people with the goal of preserving or dissolving a relationship. some things just require emotionally vulnerable friends. some things just require a change of pace that your friends and family are willing to join you in. some things require crying. some things require laughing. some things require repotting yourself somewhere where you get the right amount of sun.
life is dynamic — there’s no “healed” finish line. but as we all run our races, all there is is the constant check ins of:
did i do better than last time?
did this hurt the same as last time?
did this break the pattern?
am i feeling x about this moment or a prior one?
do i have options to talk to about this that i didn’t before?
how did this feel in my head? in my heart? in my body?
and so many other questions that can be a “how’s my driving?” bumper sticker as opposed to a constantly moving finish line.
if everything is trauma, you’ll never move through it all — if we keep putting dominoes in front of ourselves to knock down, we’ll never see them all fall and we spend life waiting for the last one to fall and not enjoying living.
find solutions that don’t bend the world to your will
i work in a creative community – i am surrounded by a lot of idealistic opportunists where a little bit of main character syndrome can go a long way, but even that can easily be turned into manipulative narcissistic traits and tendencies. this can extend to plenty of communities as well.
that being said, it’s not about you. it’s not about me. the world we navigate is one we shared — if we got rid of every man in the world we'd still have all the class, gendered, sexuality, age, body issues; if we got rid of all the straight people, we’d still have romantic issues, domestic violence, unhealthy power dynamics, transphobia, racism, etc.
we all have to live on this rock and in order to make it a more sustainable living, it's going to require understanding how to live with one another. it's gonna require navigating through shame, miseducation, unlearning and relearning, being wrong sometimes and right others, and that requires us to not pick sides but put the relationships we have on trial.
online is not real life. you block someone online and boom there they are at le pain quotidien. the block didn’t kill them — it might have made you day to day digital experience bearable but real life is different. that was your boundary and maybe those who care about you will also adopt it but without genuine and specific reason, we can’t make everyone uphold our boundaries, protect us from our triggers, take up a fight they aren’t part of, etc.
if you don’t think that’s true, and there should be walls that are erected in the name of the protection of you and your people specifically where you can act from a place of violence by silencing or aggressing anyone who disagrees with you, might i introduce you to zionism? you’d love each other.
boundaries are for you not everyone else.
don’t be afraid of context
some of y'all be so contextaphobic. context is not an excuse — it is inserting a moment into a bigger picture to see things more clearly. some people are afraid of what that picture could reveal and are invested in keeping it blurry.
cultural context, racial context, gendered context, class context, global context, temporal context all matter. online culture is all about taking a moment that made sense in original context and placing it in another context, either for comedic or dramatic effect — while fun as hell and the lifeblood of online entertainment (for better or for worse), it’s made us horrible critical thinkers, i fear.
mad people online are just some regular people with fast wifi and dial-up speed critical thinking, armchair experts who need to go outside, fake private investigators, people with no life who are living vicariously through the deification or demonization of another person or celebrity (stan culture, your move) and the kicker — they don’t care about context if it fits their narrative.
the math don’t math, but they’ll do anything for those sweet sweet engagement numbers.
please read. please critically think. please be ready to say “i didn’t know that.” please put morals over money. please don’t make it make sense but add context to it for the real sense to appear.
and a secret third space
good community is hard to come by. there have been articles about how hard it is to find other places to go and hang out, people are tired of bars to drink and trying nonalcoholic options — there’s a cultural shift in how we spend time. nothing too crazy, people still be in the clubs, out on trips, choosing experiences over saving money (lmao like what future).
this might not be for everyone but find other ways to keep community alive. some of my favorite places/activities:
game cafes (i’ll fuck anyone up in some uno)
the club (i stay on my unfriendly black hottie flow, glasses on, back to the wall)
sports games (really learn who a person is by how seriously they take this)
parks (just go sit in a park and talk to a tree like grandmother willow)
a comedy show (vet them, some of them can be shaky but there are solid ones out there)
libraries (eric adams, you bastard, you’ll pay for your crimes)
parallel play (work next to someone in silence so you don’t feel alone)
day parties (love a two steppa)
hot girl walks (gender agnostic)
streetwear crawls (just windowshop, see what fashion is becoming)
bike riding (get a group to go across town)
video games (but next to each other not online)
dave and busters (if you tryna get ignorant and lose at skeeball)
new random restaurant visit (just try it with two friends and pretend to be reviewers)
find what works for you, a space that feels comfortable, and find the people who build fun out of building each other up and not just breaking someone else down 🌱
you don’t need fixing, you need revolution.
You already know 😤😤😤