Tag Archives: rants

Normal People From A Mentally Ill Perspective

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Been reading a lot of Facebook posts from mentally normal people for several years now.  Read one this evening that really took the cake when it comes to normal thinking.  An old friend of mine and I were talking about the lunacy of modern politics and I expressed the sentiment that ‘politics are the new religion’ and that I was fearful that someday liberals and conservatives would force their version of a modern crusade.  To which one of her friends said to the effect ‘I hope so.  We conservatives have all the guns.  We need to clear out some of these tree hugging freaks.’  Well, go to hell!  Is this what normal behavior is?  Do normal people advocate murder against people they don’t agree with?  Yet the idiot who spouts such stupidity has probably never seen a war or even a gang fight.  My father spent over three years in Vietnam as a C-141 pilot.  He flew hundreds of war wounded out of Vietnam on medical missions.  He saw what war does to soldiers, some of whom weren’t old enough to buy a beer in a bar yet old enough to take napalm for Uncle Sam.  My father was at a base that came under rocket and mortar attack.  He said it completely changed his perspective once it became obvious it was him personally that his enemy wanted to kill.  He also brought home American Prisoners Of War only to see idiot protesters on the base chanting such intellectually stimulating ideas like ‘Baby Killer’ and ‘They should have killed you too.’  My father has been to war.  He has seen what it can do.  He is also not a violent man.  He may have voted for President Bush in 2000 but he also saw the whole War  on Terror as an endless fool’s errand before it even began, let alone before it became popular.

I see lots of idiots and fools spouting off on Facebook things they hopefully wouldn’t say to a person in real life.  I have grown to hate social media.  I really have.  The only reason I haven’t cancelled my personal Facebook account is because it is literally the only way I can keep in contact with the few calm and happy college and high school friends I have. And even these people were mostly social outasts when we were in college and high school.  The rest of it is pure garbage.  I see social media as a necessary evil that I have to tolerate, much like fighting traffic or enduring back pain.  I see lots if idiotic trash from people I have known all my life, especially when it comes to politics and religion.  Thank God that scientists and engineers who don’t agree with each other don’t insult and troll each other like a bunch of  normals.  You normals really are a bunch of school yard weaklings trying to cover up the fact you would soil yourselves if you ever were challenged to a fight.  You are also morally and intellectually bankrupt.  There has never been an original thought that came from a normal person.  It was normal people who supported Hitler in Germany, Lenin and Stalin in Russia, and Mao in China.  These alone should show you that normal sucks.

From what I have seen out of normal people, I don’t want the snake oil you are selling.  I don’t want to be normal.  I don’t want to obsess over politics, sex, CNN, money, possessions, Game of Thrones, or whatever horse feces is trending this week.  I don’t want to be a short sighted, unthinking, materialistic sheep.  I am amazed even after thirty six years of living as a human how short sighted and panicky most normal people are.  Normal people are really stupid.  Not even twenty years of easy access to information via the internet and search engines has cured your stupidity.  Smart people never have and never will be able to out vote stupid normal people.  We simply don’t have the numbers.  But we don’t have to.  Smart people keep science and technology advancing.  I know most of you normals are scared senseless of robots and possible AI becoming hostile.  I would laugh and cry both if AI machines and programs had more empathy and caring than humans.  We humans have had thousands of years of civilizing, religion, and moral codes and yet there are still some chumps who think theft, murder, and adultery are good ideas.  Some of you normals seem to think that the basic rules of civilization don’t apply to you.  You think that somehow you are special and are allow to steal, kill, fornicate, and generally be a zit on the face of humanity.  That is more delusional than any thought I ever had as a schizophrenic.  You normals are delusional.  You normals are out of touch with reality.  I never want to be in your stupid social club.  Screw you.   I am sick of normal people.  I never want to be normal.

 

Why I Actually Like Being An Adult, Disability Insurance, and Other Side Rants

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When I was growing up and going through middle school in the early 1990s (back in the dark ages before we had internet in every house, restaurant, laundromat, etc.), I had this teacher who loved to tell us about the dreaded ‘cold cruel world’ and how much being an adult was going to suck.  As a naive thirteen year old growing up in the farm belt of rural Nebraska (I lived at least 65 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart), I was by no means wise to the ways of the world.  We didn’t even get cable tv in my town until the late 1980s, so all I got to see of the outside world back then was what Ted Turner chose to show us on CNN every night.  As a child I was only vaguely aware there was a world outside of Nebraska and that people went to college for things other than becoming doctors, teachers, and lawyers.  But practically everyone else I ever knew were farmers and had no real need for any real ‘formal education.’  So naturally I blew off my teacher telling me how lousy being an adult was because, quite frankly, my hometown had nothing to offer someone with my natural talents and abilities.  I didn’t complain, I didn’t try to dispute my elders when they warned me ‘wait until you have kids’ or ‘wait until you have a job you hate’ or ‘wait until you have to pay taxes.’  I didn’t complain or dispute because 1) I was just a kid and what do kids know and 2) Starting about age 12 I looked all around me and saw many adults who literally could not think for themselves or long termed.  I saw many adults who complained about living in a rural area, complained about work, complained about their spouses, complained about how their kids acted, complained about the weather (quite common among farmers), complained about politicians, etc. but I never once saw any adult try to do anything to change their situations or improve themselves.  Once, being the curious child I was, I actually asked one of these wise adults why no one tried to do anything to change things.  The angered look on this grown up’s face made me think I had committed some form of blasphemy like saying the Ten Commandments were a lousy idea.  After that I made it a point to never to question an authority figure so blatantly.

Putting all of these observations together I became convinced that I probably wouldn’t like being an adult was as grumpy and unthinking that many of the adults I saw.  But, I also hated being a kid.  Oh did I ever hate it.  I was constantly bullied for being smart and different.  My teachers often didn’t like me because I often could find easier ways to solving problems then what they were teaching us.  My football coaches didn’t like that I wasn’t Joe Rah-Rah.  I didn’t have many friends because I just didn’t ‘go along to get along.’  And I didn’t like the fact that, as a kid, no one took my complaints and problems seriously.  When I said I wasn’t being challenged in school, I was told I had a problem with authority.  When I didn’t bring home straight A’s, I was told I was an underachiever.  I wasn’t told that no one in the work world cared to see your high school report cards.  And I certainly wasn’t told that adults are often as clueless as kids about what’s really going on and what they want out of life.  The adults were just better at hiding it and lying to themselves.

Eventually, like all nightmares, my time as a kid ended.  I went on to college.  While I didn’t leave Nebraska or find the college campus to be completely full of people just as smart and quirky as I was (thank you for getting my hopes up, college recruiters), I did meet some cool and stimulating people.  As it was a small college with people from all over the world as well as the United States in very close proximity, it was quite easy to socialize with many people with different backgrounds.  It was also not so big of a college that international students, in state students, city kids, farm kids, etc. could get by with just socializing with people like them.  To have any hope of a social life a person would have to socialize with many different people.  Leave your biases and stereotypes at the door, I suppose.  I met most of the people I have kept as friends to this day at college.  I learned a good deal about business, economics, personal finance, accounting, writing, etc. that, in all honesty, I should have ideally been taught in college.  I discussed this in an earlier post.

Yet, as much as I liked college, I came to find I enjoyed being an adult even more.  As an adult, you can choose were you want to work.  As a kid, your parents or the local government chooses where you go to school.  We had only one school in our town, the nearest private school was over 65 miles away, and most of the schools within a 50 mile radius were exactly the same as mine.  Home schooling wasn’t really popular back then. My best friend, and occasional dating interest was homeschooled until high school.  Kind of funny, though, when she entered high school the school wanted to put her in remedial education and she wound up being an honor student within a few months.  And for those who say that ‘home school kids have no social skills even if they are book smart’, I will say that two of my best and most stable friends came from home school environments.  But maybe because these two were so well read and treated a nerdy outcast like myself so well makes them ‘have no social skills.’  I couldn’t leave the school I was in.  My family would not have liked having someone with a GED in their family.  It is far easier for me as a grown up to leave a job where the boss and I don’t mesh or if I don’t like that my coworkers hardly work and don’t care about the customers.

Other things that are cool about being an adult is I get to do cool things like vote, set up my own schedules, read whatever I wan to read, watch whatever educational videos I want, make whatever friends I want without family pressures or social limitations, write my own blogs (we didn’t even have blogging back in the mid 1990s as there was no easy access to internet), I don’t have to date if I don’t want to (whereas in high school I was often ridiculed because I couldn’t get a girl to date me besides my homeschool friend, and even then I was still ridiculed because she came from the proverbial ‘wrong side of the tracks’), I can form my own beliefs and don’t have to really fear if I share these beliefs or not, I don’t have to think anything I don’t believe or lie just to impress some authority figure who supposedly is wiser than me because he’s old and has more money and prestige.  Shoot, I don’t even have to work if I don’t want to.

One thing I would have loved to have known about applying for Disability Insurance was, if I filed before my 22nd birthday, I would have had my monthly benefits determined by my parents’ income.  I was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia at age 20, graduated college at age 23, but didn’t file for disability before until age 25.  Financially I shot myself in the foot because I didn’t apply for disability before age 22 since both of my parents were medical professionals.  I would be making much more than I am now had I not tried the John Wayne gut it out until it was obvious the cause was lost routine.  Yet that is in the past.  I still do well because I can choose to live a minimalist style of life as a single adult.

Even though I was set back for several years because I tried to work and be a productive citizen by not dropping out of college and applying for disability at a younger age, I am still free to make the choices in lifestyle to adjust accordingly.  Yes it was hard to learn to live below what most Americans would consider poverty level and I did make some mistakes along the way.  But I learned from those mistakes and adjusted my game plans and lifestyle accordingly.

To be quite honest, I don’t know many people besides myself who can live on less than $15,000 per year, which is $125o per month.  At the average American hourly wage of approximately $13 per hour, that’s only 20 hours of work per week.  I make even less than $1250 a month and I live quite well, especially since I’m debt free.  Some may disdain me for ‘being on the dole’ and say ‘you just live off the government.’  But, you know what, had I never become mentally ill I would have achieved my dream of going into medical research, would probably be making six figures by now, would have gotten married, had kids, owned a McMansion, and been one of those ‘respectable’ types that pays more in taxes than most people.  Not everyone on disability got there because they are lazy and want a free ride.  Believe it or not, there are a few of us who got there because of things we couldn’t control.  Maybe people like me who are smart and on disability in spite doing all the right things are as rare as unicorns but we still exist.  Another great thing about being an adult is I don’t have to try to please people who think I am a leech and lazy for receiving disability.  I hate being on disability, God do I hate it.  But that is essentially the only option for people with mental illnesses in my situation besides homelessness or prison.

In closing, I know this post and rant was quite long winded and had a bit of a sharper edge to it than my regular posts.  For this I don’t apologize because, as an adult without an employer, family, or a social circle I didn’t choose, I really don’t have to apologize for speaking the truth.  As an adult I have far more choices and control of my own life.  That alone is reason enough why I actually like being an adult.