Mental health issues are often asserted as neurochemical or physiological malfunction, located in the individual. Yet this framing conceals how distress emerges from larger social systems, which depend upon gradients of exclusion and disaffection to function. Just as unemployment is not an error but a structural feature of employment markets, sorrow and psychic fracture are […]
Spirituality more broadly seems to have been seduced by a personality cult that opportunistically misrepresents and all too easily misunderstands messenger and signal as isomorphic with message, quite agnostic of the significance of any particular narrative. This is an elementary projective narcissism, identifying individual with an essentially inarticulable metaphysics of Other and world that is […]
I have seen what trauma does. It can take good people and bend them backwards against their will, leading into all manner of despair and hardship. I have seen the ways that people self-define through the things they know and the suffering that has shaped them. I have witnessed as their lonely lives lead them […]
You should see (or intuitively feel) how shame is a trap, a labyrinth of pure abstraction and emotionally-infused imagination or half-blind fear that no rational or intelligent person should ever become ensnared by and yet we just can’t help ourselves and so easily and serially drift through regret into pity and – often enough – […]
Having breakfast today and, grateful for a brief respite from wearing surgical masks in the current pandemic context, someone truly eye-catching walked in to order coffee. Young, petite, pretty with clear skin and sparkling eyes that were as yet undulled by the disillusionment of time and age. She was quite naturally beautiful and everyone there […]
Depression is such a fickle thing. Some days everything seems fine, you build yourself up and seem so full of joy and purpose and then one look, one word or callous gesture just brings it all crashing back down. The seduction of emotional isolation, alienation and catastrophic disengagement with the world is at these times […]
Today’s brief reflection on the state of humanity is brought to you by a feeling of overwhelming futility and an acute awareness of the pointless, vacuous and utterly narcissistic bullshit that consumes us all. Finding ourselves inhabiting whichever time and place we transiently occupy, and encountering the limiting cognitive language and behavioural repertoire of a […]
Some days it all just gets away from me. I try to value and appreciate the words and worlds of those around me but they ring so hollow and haunted that I just seem to end up clutching my own similarly fictional, if ever so slightly better-informed, reality to my chest as a treasured possession […]
“My beauty was my curse, so to speak; it created an impenetrable shield between people and who I really was.” ~Hedy Lamarr There really does seem to be something of a deep and irremediable sorrow in all great beauty. We might say the same of a beautiful mind as much as of an attractive face […]
There seems to be something of a plausible inevitability to depression and psychological suffering. Being that our minds have been sculpted by long-term evolutionary biases towards survivability in a probabilistically uncertain and materially dangerous world, there is something of a hard-coded orientation towards pessimism (or at the very least – pragmatism) within us all. Culture […]
There is a deep and disconsolate desolation I feel at times, a profound and overwhelming sense of futility and pointlessness that is impermeable to light and is also and quite equally unassailable by any rationale of emotional transience, by appeals to the generally temporary nature of such a darkening and empty inundation. I doubt very […]
Everything begins as nothing and eventually returns there again. There is no real loss or sorrow, just the transience and self-inflected emptiness that pervades everything in life and to which we all must eventually return. A hollow, haunting experience of these facts can be overwhelming but it is worth remembering that if you are sensitive, […]
Daedelus Kite 