I shared a meme on Facebook about how becoming an adult is basically just relearning all the things you learned from people who didn't know what they were doing any more then you did when you started adulting. That's paraphrased. My mom commented on it, nothing real bad but she definitely took offense to the idea that she didn't know what she was doing in regards to raising her children. I replied to her comment asking her if she ever caught herself thinking back to when my brother and I were young and knowing she would have made different choices in some areas had she known there were even choices to be had regarding some things, or had the science advanced enough to show that common knowledge of the time was flawed and doing things a certain way was actually causing the issue instead of helping it? I went on to say that even tho it's not even been a full ten years since I had my fairkid, with how much technology and science and medicine has advanced in just that short time we know things we didn't when I first had her so I know some choices I made then thinking they were right I would all the way not make had I had the knowledge then I have today so I can only imagine how strong that feeling would be in her case seeing how much things have advanced from when my brother and I were the age the fairkid is now, especially when you consider things like how much mental health was still stigmatized back then and how, had my brother and I been born today in the world where we know the brain gets sick sometimes and pretending it doesn't get sick and need to see a doctor just like organs sometimes do doesn't do anything but hurt not only the people with the sick brain but everyone around them and then it passes on to everyone after them in their family until someone finally addresses the sick brain issue. I had more to say but then I realized I was leaving another comment reply so I decided to cut and paste it when I got done with it and I'm going to leave it here:
When you got your very first apartment and started adulting you had to relearn a lot of things that, until that point in your life, never even entered your mind at all period, let alone occur to you if it was "the right way" to accomplish the thing when you learned how to do it the first time when you still lived in your childhood home, right? And the way you initially learned said things was from watching the people around you accomplish said things, cuz a lot of the sort of stuff this post is referring to is the sort of stuff people didn't sit down and teach their kids cuz they're the kinds of things people really didn't start talking about openly and without shame until fairly recently. We just didn't really know a whole lot about mental health and emotional maturity and emotional wellness and because humans like to shun what they don't understand and also humans have a habit of fearing the things they don't understand we would hide when our brains got sick for fear of how the world would treat us...plus it's scary when your brain starts messing with you and telling you stuff that just isn't real like it does when it gets sick with depression or anxiety or schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and since it's our brain, even though we know something is wonky with our brain it's hard to accept that the thing you audibly hear with your real life actual ears from outside your own head that no one else can hear but you KNOW you did or see something the same way you see anything and everything else in the room but people you know and love and who you know love you and would absolutely never pull your leg like that are telling you the thing you see with your eyes that looks just as real as the person standing there not seeing said thing isn't there or when you are so sad and tired and unmotivated and no matter how much you sleep you can't seem to find the energy to even think about the things you have to do for life to flow like it's supposed to and you feel that way for months and nothing helps then you just wake up one day and all the stuff you could not do to save your life, (like take your empty cans to the trash can or put pants on even) you manage to actually have the desire and ability to knock it all out in about four hours, and are still able to continue doing stuff and next thing you know it's been six days and you have an entire book of bylaws for a newly formed nonprofit organization written perfectly with all the t's crossed and all the I's dotted, including being triple checked that all the parts covered by the law are in accordance with the laws pertaining to the sector in which the nonprofit is intending to function, uploaded to a newly created, fully functional and visually aesthetic website that looks like it was professionally designed for said nonprofit complete with a forum, an area dedicated to explaining the goals of the organization, an area set up to accept donations that would go to it's fully legal and legit bank account (that you can only get once the organization is formed legally with the proper governmental agency because you have to have identification numbers you can only get from said agency and they only give them to formed ready to function organizations) or, to make things easier there's the option to donate via PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, or if a person would prefer a more decentralized form of philanthropy, which we understand the desire for privacy completely...we have the business address at a property we just purchased under a pen name three states away so we wouldn't run the risk of a fanatic who is even more dedicated to the cause than we are taking offense to something somehow and put our families in danger because they used our website to dox us or something equally scary... they can send their donation using any one of these five cryptocurrencies listed beside their respective Blockchain wallet address with a side note that there are plans to support even more coins in the future, an area dedicated to members with a little bio about each person and their role on the team that the first time any of said team heard any of this or that they had a job they need to do is when the original person who created all this stuff surfaced after five days for more printer ink and to get everyone started on their projects, and all of this new site is hosted on its very own newly created server....that is located at the property mentioned earlier that's three states away under a pen name, and the creator of all this had absolutely zero working knowledge of forming organizations or creating legally binding bylaws for anything at all or really anything about business law or about running a business or a nonprofit organization and the most computer knowledge they had, hardware or software, when they were playing catch-up during the first four hours of this phase of life, before they ever even considered the need for such an organization as what now is its own legal entity, was how to make little icons fall down on their personal Myspace page and to link other sites on the internet from their own page, so all a person would have to do is click the words and they'd be taken to the website without entering the web address into the address bar, using HTML script...and knowing their brain has to be sick for them to go from accomplishing such an amazing, seemingly impossible feat completely on their own from the realization there was a need to realizing there isn't anyone doing the needed thing anywhere to researching what goes into building the needed entity (which included learning such that's what it's called) to provide the needed thing and since it's a common issue lots of people need making sure the built entity is capable of handling the anticipated demand, to realizing there are grants to pay for the thing even but since there's no organization to apply for the grants to use on the needed thing then distribute the needed thing to all the people with the need all those people are just SOL, to researching what criteria has to be met to get the funding, to researching each individual part of meeting the criteria, to deciding there were only x amount of steps in creating the organization that can legally be granted the funds for the thing...five steps isn't so hard...to creating the nonprofit to making sure there's no laws broken anywhere (more research) to realizing the grant probably won't get awarded if it doesn't look like we're serious (it became we once the research showed just how much work goes into running something that helps the community like this entity you just created in theory will do to deciding a website with it's official sounding domain address would probably help credibility to realizing you don't know squat about making a website to learning how to create a website and realizing how easy it would be to make different sections on the site and knowing you really ought to do a thing as you have the urge because you know if you tell yourself you'll add it later there's a chance later will never come so may as well do it when ya feel like doin it to trying to anticipate everything you'd have to add a new section of the website to realizing you're gonna need to make accounts for the entity because you already established you don't want anyone to be able to find you or your family thru the website so you definitely don't want the entity's money in any of your personal accounts, plus checks would be written in the name of the entity anyway and that would just be a mess to realizing you can't be the only person dedicated to privacy so maybe there ought to be ways to donate that don't tie a person to their donation to researching how that would even be possible to discovering crypto and realizing crypto isn't really one size fits all so you gotta support multiple coins to realizing after creating five wallets you really can't create wallets for every coin out there and you're starting to get a little sleepy so you tell yourself you'll put that on your list to get done later to printing the discriptions of all your friends who you put into the jobs needed to run the organization and realizing you oughta tell them you created work for them to running outta ink while printing and finding all your people to explaining it all....you know you're capable of all of that and you get all that done in just six days and it's flawless and self taught, so then when you go to sleep and then wake up the next day and can't bring yourself to put your pants and the thought of even looking at your computer makes you groan and roll over and cover your head with a blanket and you absolutely cannot bring yourself to get out of bed at all not to eat not to take your pets outside not to get clean clothes outta the dresser where you put them, was it really only a week ago you did all that catch up cleaning??? Where did that person go and why am I left with...this??? And you struggle with feeling hopeless because you may as well not have limbs or the ability to think with how inaccessible those things are to you when this phase of existence starts back up and it would be better you catch yourself thinking sometimes, if you didn't ever get the flashes of productivity..you feel maybe it'd be easier to accept the inability to function if the near superhuman should be impossible feats of productivity and positivity and genuine Gods honest joy and peace and capability weren't a thing cuz you can't miss a thing you've never had but as it stands right now you have to count 7+8 with your fingers because your brain in this phase is covered by the thickest fog imaginable and it is so hard to get it to function at all that it almost actually hurts to try so you just kinda... don't when you're like this and you know it's not laziness, you know your brain is sick but you can't even make yourself call the doctor cuz the effort it would take to get to the initial appointment is so overwhelming to even think about you just end up staying in bed.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments. I'll gather my first comment in the post once I get some food in me. Let's keep our brains healthy, Belmontians!
Much love,
fourthgenbelmontian