WordPress has a feature to schedule your posts in advance. I am making full use of this feature. This post, in fact, was written a week ago. I aim to have a post a day, topping up the schedule every few weeks. I have a backlog of personal writing which I pull from. That will run out eventually. So we have this here filler post. This post basically says nothing of value except the info that you’ll get regular posts (for sure).
Author: tom-collingwood
The Liar Poet
I can write poems
about feelings I do not feel
I am a liar poet. My poems lack
true depth
true insight
true connection
But maybe the words I write lose their writer the moment they’re read
How about that?
This one is yours now.
The Inevitability of Madness
I am diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. I’ve been psychosis free for 3 years. So safe to say I don’t have a chronic case. But I am susceptible to future psychosis in times of stress or after mind altering drug use.
Sometimes I look to the future and get a bit scared. Each time I have had psychosis it gets a little worse. First lasted a few days, second a week and the third and latest was two whole months. I worry that the next will be big and it will be bad.
The psychosis is delusional. No hallucinations or hearing voices. Flight of ideas & beliefs held not based in the accepted reality which most of us live in. The first two episodes were paranoid and dark in content. The third was manic. It was a pretty good time in places. Life was magical and I was often euphoric. But it is completely destabilising to your psyche and it interrupts your life. You cannot get anything done. It scares the people around you and breaks the hearts of those closest to you. There is a communication barrier, they won’t get your ideas, and you will find their world dull and boring.
So I do my best in the time I have sane to boost my mental health. I have a firm support group with my friends and family and I practice meditation and mindfulness.
On the internet the rate of remission for schizophrenia that is floating around is around 36%. I’m not even sure what that rate means. There’s a high chance that I’ll have an episode again in my life time. Is it inevitable? Not sure. I’ll keep you updated.
Hippos
Sorry I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation about about sub-Saharan African aquatic mammals. Did you know hippopotamuses communicate through snorts and grunts? It’s true! These snorts and grunts cause subtle vibrations in the water. Other hippos can tell who’s snorting this and who’s grunting that by inhaling the bubbles that are in the minute water vibrations. The gas reaches their tongue and the taste determines the sender. Hippos can taste another hippopotamus from a mile off! This wine tastes great, doesn’t it? In fact, their sophisticated taste makes hippos perfect sommeliers. Who said they can’t tell a merlot from a pinot noir?
I knew a hippo sommelier, they were a terrible drunk and they would only spit out the wine at people’s faces. But a hippo sommelier was such a curiosity that they got away with such awful manners. I think they chose this evenings wine selection…
Oh you have to make a call? Take care, and if you see that hippo tell them the wine tastes rather dry with this fish. If there’s wine on their chin, be on guard for a spit!
Becoming no-one
My husband abandoned me and became a monk.
These monks didn’t believe in the idea of an inherent self, a witness behind the thoughts. This belief led them to drop their names, labels and all identities they once assumed. They had trouble organising themselves and soon couldn’t tell each other apart. When I called even the monastery didn’t know if he was still there or not because he had no name and no traits.
After a while, I became lonely and joined the nameless order as a nun to find my husband. I never found him. I abandoned everything searching; my name, my gender, my nationality, my beliefs, my hair, my possessions. I became no one in search of another no one. I thought even though all the monastics had adopted the same appearance, the same mannerisms, the same plastered expression of peace that I would still be able to recognise my husband.
I realised that I could pick any one of the nameless and make them my husband for they had dropped their memories just like everything else. If there was no self, who did the memories held belong to? No one. So they let them go as, eventually, did I in an act of voluntary dementia. I saw that these memories I had were not my own. I never had a husband, he never had a wife, I never had myself and he never had himself. The body and mind that was once “mine” drifted in the ocean of nameless monastics. Just an experience of awareness that had shed everything.
Love
Love is not seeing
Love is being
Love is not falling
Love is built
Love is not holding tight
Love is letting go
Love is inside not outside
Love is for all not for one
Love is not a transaction
Love is not an exchange
Love is given with no expectation
Don’t let love be dictated to you
Discover your own kind of love
To be anon
What if I stay very anonymous on this site? What advantages does that bring?
- If I am a man I will not be judged as a man. Any unmanly comments and thoughts go unquestioned or negatively received.
- If I am a woman I will not be judged in this sexist culture and any unconscious bias will not be used
- Freedom from any box I normally have to fit myself in everyday to be normal or fit within my role.
- Non identifiable. This helps freedom of speech or as I like to call it in this case freedom-of-embarrassment-when-I-realise-Jill-from-accounting-read-my-blog.
What disadvantages does it bring?
- I cannot make posts speaking from personal experience on topics such as gender, race & orientation.
- I cannot be wholly authentic and may end up self censoring.
- Most who want to read me will not be sexist, homophobic or racist and can easily withstand my identities. Those who cannot, I do not want to associate with and can go away.
We will see how anon I choose to be. I’m not particularly bothered but I know the road away from anonymity on the internet is a one way road. Everything sticks out here.
Intense Daydreaming
A burst of intense daydreaming led me to create this site. I want to offload my dreaming & thinking. Where it can find others and perhaps be productive in someone else’s head.
I struggle with embarrassment when posting publicly. I think this is quite common. I hope to address this and improve. Each post will be a mark of my headspace at that time and there is no need for embarrassment when reading them in the future. I will acknowledge my past and be respectful of it.
To offloading on the internet! And the big fat nobody who will read it.
Thought Vacations 