Stay tuned to read more of my thoughts from my silly little brain bag.
Hello world! One of the things that has been getting me into neocities is that one saying that lots of people are discouraged by, "I was born too late to explore the planet, but too early to explore the cosmos." That may be true, but we were born in the right time to explore the internet, and I think the internet has a lot of beauty. While it is true that I loved the personality the internet had in the early 2000s, I think it is worth stating that there are still humans on the internet, and as long as there are people on the web, there is always potential for there to be personality. I mean, compare some regular pages on the internet to these neocities. Minimalism is in style, and while it is rather asthetic at times, it doesn't beat the pure raw asthetic of these neocities. I plan on posting more of my brain thoughts on this page, but I figured this would be a good startm with a basic hello, and a random thought.
It seems like every time I learn something new out there about what's going on in the world, it is always something bad. There's the stuff with Roblox sueing one of its users, Schlep, for trying to take down predators on its platform, there's YouTube integrating AI to verify your age for you to gate keep you from content if it thinks you're a minor (guess I can't watch Bluey anymore), and don't even get me started on Trump. It is very easy in these times to become cynical, to see the worst in humanity and assume that we are just cooked as a species. If my life experiences and education have taught me anything is that when bad things happen, people rise up and do good to spite the bad. There are firefighters to put out fires, there are politicians that push back against facism, and there is a whole community of people rising up against Roblox to speak truth to power.
When all we get our news from is, well, the news, we are stuck with the pessimistic twist, but we don't see the ways people stand up and rise to the occassion. And it's not like we are hopeless because we aren't the one's in power here. I don't think people realize how powerful it is to be a human; to exist and to be part of the people. It reminds me of the Stonewall Riots, which kicked off the modern LGBT rights movement. The world at that time was against them, and it only took one bar rising up to light a spark. Today, we have entire communities rising up. Even MAGA is starting to push back against the stuff with the Epstein files not being released. And while progress and change is slow, it does happen, we just have to give ourselves the chance to see it happen.
Given what I know about cognitive psychology, people often intuite their stances and then find reasons to back it up, rather than do the more logical thing like looking at all the reasons then coming to an answer. This is why we have equally smart people disagreeing about seemingly basic topics, and why confirmation bias is a thing. I think so many of us have intuited that we are cooked, but when we look back on human history, we see a clear pattern, and its that whenever bad things happen in our world, there is always someone fighting back against it, and if regimes have fallen before, and if reputations have been destroyed for protecting a brand over people and children, maybe it can happen again. The best hope is born of evidence.
I think Neocities solved my boredom. I recently graduated and I have no job, so I am at a point in my life where I have a lot of free time. Being ADHD this has lead to a lot of boredom, because I only enjoy being on break for so long. When I was younger, and we had summer break, I would get restless towards the end of the 2 month break. I would often learn a new skill in this time to keep my brain going. After my freshman year in highschool, I found myself writing an entire book. It was a leather and sawdust type of book, very rustic and vintage, and I filled it out as a reference book which I used throughout the rest of highschool. It had equations, important dates, anything you'd expect in a mysterious scientific journal. Another summer I learned how to read Hebrew so I could better arm myself when people used the Bible against me. This summer I am trying to learn HTML and CSS, an interesting task given that I am not very tech savvy, but here we are, and this site is coming together quite nicely. I can add "build a website" to the long list of things I have accomplished because I was too bored to function. Sometimes boredom can serve a helpful purpose.
For most of my life, I've been in school. It always kept me busy to the point that I would envy other people's free time. If another person was unemployed, I couldn't understand why they would be upset about it, because why should you when you have all that free time to yourself. Now I'm living the fantasy and it isn't all I have ever dreamed of. That isn't to say that life is all abd, it is just a perfect combination of conditions that makes boredom my baseline. Normally I'm in school, and if I'm not, then I'm working. But now I finished school, and I can't work yet. Because of this, I feel like I am just waking up each day asking myself what to do so I don't feel bored. That is one of the main drivers for why I made this website. It stemmed from my love of nostalgia mixed with my desire to do something completely new. To engage in a hobby that enraptured me. Now that I have filled out a lot of this website, I'm spending less and less time working on it. And since the hobby isn't always offering a relief to my boredom, I have found myself seeking out friend's company more than I normally would. That's all well and good except for when those friends are also busy with work and responsibilities. As such, it feels like I am left alone with myself during the day while everyone works, and at night when everyone else goes to sleep. There is maybe a couple of hours where my friends are available and it hurts on the days when I can't connect with them. I'm writing about this not just because it is good to get those feelings out and normalize the experience of loneliness on the internet, but also because I know I'm not the only one going through this. Life has gotten painfully lonely for many since the advent of the internet, Covid, and general life changes. I don't want to harp on that grand narrative that we are more disconnected as a species now than ever, but I do wanna shine light on the pain of loneliness and just get the words out there. I know I am mostly writing to a screen right now, moreso than an embodied soul, but when you live life in the closet for enough years, and learn to live off of very little attention and compassion, even talking to a screen can feel comforting at times. Maybe one day I'll write about my story, the things I survived, and the things I have gone through. But today, I just wanted to write about this pain, and it feels better having gotten it out. I hope moving forward that I can have more space to connect with people throughout my day, and not just anyone, but people that can actually see my authentic self, but I also hope that I can find long term solutions to the boredom I face so that I can at least thrive and take in all this freetime with joy while I am still unemployed, because once I get a job I will be very busy. Might as well use this freetime while I still have it.
I'm gay, and I have been gay for as long as I can remember. Something about getting to write out those words here is such a relief, and I think it is because I know the value of being able to utter or write those words anywhere, because I have known the pain of not being able to express them...To put a long story short, I came out to my parents 7 or so years ago when I was still in highschool, and their reaction was less than ideal. In college I was really able to explore who I was outside of what my parents had to say. I got to try things like makeup, going to queer spaces and making friends in the community. This freedom to explore onesself and it being good and normal is something that I miss dearly. After graduating college, circumstance has me living back at home with my family. While the topic of my sexuality doesn't come up, and hasn't since I came out, I still feel the oppressive atmosphere.
People often times talk about the type of homophobia that is overt, and has people adding something unpleasant to the mix, like calling you slurs or abusing you for not "behaving", but my experience has been a lack of the positive. When you refuse to acknowledge your child's queer identity, it hurts, and it communicates "I can't be myself" and "I have to hide this from you in order to be enough." I have learned through years of therapy that I cannot get everyone to understand me, and that holding out hope for certain people to change is more exhausting that helpful, especially when they have already made up their mind about me. But therapy has also taught me that I can give myself that which I seek from my parents.
I've had overtly homophobic roomates before that have called me slurs, and in highschool I remember living under the threat of getting kicked out by the leaders of my school if I ever came out (which put tremendous stress on my younger self, as you could imagine). I've lived through so much homophobia and pain, but the worst of it I have ever experienced is my parents lack of capacity to fully see and embrace me. It is like I am hearing them say "we can't see the real you because it is too disturbing for us, and we need you to be something else." To add insult to injury, they often couldn't hear my own voice because there was a Bible always lodged between my voice and their ears, effectively blocking mine out. This kind of religious trauma runs deep because how could I ever compete with "the word of God" when I'm communicating about my experience, which in their eyes is nothing compared to scripture.
I write about this not because I simply wanted to trauma dump, but because I was free to express and explore anywhich way I pleased for the last 6 years, and now I am settling back into the reality that I have to hide again. I know most would say that I shouldn't hide, that I should stand my ground with confidence and pride, but whenever I had...it just resulted in me getting yelled at, put down, punished with religion, and degraded as a human in more ways than I care to mention. But I don't like writing posts like these, because I don't like portraying the story as entirely dark and grimy, but I also don't want to crucify my own pain by covering it up with a silver lining.
I think all of this is undeserved, but I also think it is something I can learn to live with. I've been practicing living in this space of emotional neglect by listening to my inner voice and focusing on it more than I focus on that of my parents. This means that when I hear religious jargon that either demeans the importance of queer people or any other minority, instead of focusing on trying to fix them or get them to understand, I shift to the inner voice, that hurting child in me, and I ask it to tell me what it wants me to know. My parents could never hear this voice, but I can. This part needs attention and care, as any child does after they come home from school, having been bullied that day. I sit with it, I don't try to tell it to see things differently, nor do I tell it to be any different. I create space for that part to exist and be seen and known. And when I practice this, I do feel a weight lifted off, because after all, our parents aren't gods who know it all; they are flawed humans with biases, inner ugliness, and a propensity towards mistakes. And when I can rely less on their words, treat them less like people that I need admiration from, and shift towards attending to my inner hurt, the pain gets a little better. So yeah, I do still live in a hostile environment that is painfully suffocating, and at the same time, I know how to hold my breath, and even how to breathe when I am being suffocated by the atmosphere of religious intolerance.
I think my hope in all of this lies in that this pain sucks, and there's no getting around that, but this pain is also not the whole story, and there are spaces where I can be myself and where I can be seen, and I am actively working on making one of those safe spaces within myself so that I can carry it with me wherever I go. That is the hope for myself, and to anyone out there suffering a similar circumstance. My heart goes out to you, and I hope, for humanity's sake, that you keep going, because the world would never be as beautiful as it is if it didn't have you in it.
Lately I have been processing how to express my special interests without exhausting the energy of those around me. For context, I'm ADHD, specifically the inattentive/hyperactive type, meaning I get the best of both worlds, and can be completely turned off when something isn't stimulating for me (inattention), and that I also try to find ways to stimulate my mind in those understimulating spaces (hyperactive). Because of this, my baseline is often that I am bored and find many things in life to be monotanous and bland, which can make me come across as lazy and uninspired on my worst days. But beneath all of that is a brain that is trying to function in a world that is often not stimulating enough, and while some may be foolish to assert that we just ought to cope with the lack of stimulation, every brain needs stimulation, with some studies suggesting that our brainmatter degrades and falls apart when not given ample stimulation and meaningful activities.
This takes me to the concept of special interests. Special interests (also called hyperfixations) are things that ADHDer's and people on the autism spectrum find especially interesting, to the point that in more extreme contexts, the individual doesn't like engaging in activities unless their special interest is somehow included. Think about the overplayed stereotype of the autistic person who likes trains. They don't talk about much other than trains, and that is because trains are their special interest. In my case, I have a handful of hyperfixations, and this is one of the ways my brain seeks out stimulation, but also connection.
Connection over hyperfixations is nothing original on my part, most people connect over shared experiences and interests (after all, it is what you are often prompted to put on your dating profile when you make one). For an ADHDer, it can often be taken to its extreme where if you called me and wanted me to talk about what was going on in my life, since I am currently unemployed and out of school, I would default to talking about the new Superman movie, or the original Star Trek series. Thinking from the average person's experience, regardless of if the individual is neurodivergent or not, it can be exhausting listening to someone like me go on for seemingly hours about the exact same topic that doesn't always appeal to other people.
Some people come home from a long day exhausted and don't have the energy to hear me talk about how much I loved James Gunn's Superman movie, nor does everyone care about the tiny features I add to my neocity on a daily basis. It's tricky because I found that I can exhaust other people's energy with my hyperfixations to the point that I ask myself if I'm doing something wrong or if it makes me a bad person. Doesn't this all mean that there's something wrong with me?
It is still a lesson I am trying to learn, but I think ADHDers like myself need to learn to sit in the nuance that our brains aren't broken and do not need fixing, and at times it is also true that our quirks can overwhelm people. Both of these are true at the same time, and because of this, we need to learn how to talk about ADHD people in a way that reflects that they don't need to change, and that sometimes we need more outlets to express ourselves. That's why I am here on neocities. I cannot tell you how many times my interests in Superman and Star Trek have exhausted the energy of good and lovely people that actually care deeply about my most authentic self, and the struggle those people have had at mentioning that my hyperfixations can sap their energy. I think these people are trying to be kind and nice to me, but it also could be balanced out by them showing the same kindness for themselves too, even if it means I have to redirect my special interest energy to a different space for a time.
So where does this leave us. I think the urge to share and express a special interest in neurodivergent people is a need that deserves to be met, but that there are nuanced ways to get that need met. I think often times if others are getting exhausted or turned off by us sharing our interests, it can be for a variety of reasons, but many of those reasons goes back to what it says about the other person, and that it does not mean there is something wrong or broken about us, despite that being the more dominant narrative. Maybe the other person has a lot going on and struggles to hold space for it. Maybe the other person isn't interested in the same things we are. And maybe all of that is okay and that there are spaces and places we can let our fixations thrive and be expressed. I think it is also true that under the terms and conditions in being friends with neurodivergent persons, we also sign up for each of our quirks as well and that we need to make space for those quirks too.
Maybe at the end of the day we have to find our own way to engage in our interests in ways that can pull people towards us so they can interact with something important to us, while also practicing the capacity to pause when we see the figurative yellow traffic light flashing. That metaphor explains why I still struggle with that balance of sharing the hyperfixation vs knowing when to redirect that energy elsewhere, because whenever I have seen a yellow light, I can almost feel the neurons in my brain snap in half as I struggle to calculate if I should stop or speed through the light. In either case, practice makes better, and I am hoping I can do both by giving myself some grace and letting my special interests out as often as I need, while practicing reading the room and directing my energy to spaces that can receive my passion.
I became curious of this question as I was sitting in church against my will this morning. As humans, we like to think that we base all our beliefs on evidence, and that we have reasons for why we believe what we do. As a skeptic and agnostic myself, it puts doubt on beliefs that often times do not have evidence that is as easy to interpret as a proposed solution for an equation. Some beliefs out there I cannot find direct scientific evidence for; the belief in God, the belief that the universe has a plan and that everything happens for a reason, that death isn't the end. The more fantastical and stigmatized ones too like horoscopes, certain alternative medicines, the existence of ghosts and the earth being flat. I haven't been able to buy into some of these ideas, but there are ideas I cannot prove that I do believe on a subconscious level, even if my conscious brain doesn't adhere to the ideas logically.
I believe deep down, a part of me believes in multiversal theory, even though I have no evidence of it. I believe (in a nuanced way) that there is good and evil in the world, even though you cannot measure either or definitively quantify them.
My deepest core beliefs are also founded on intuitions that I can't prove beyond the shadow of a doubt; that humans are inately good, that the more diversity and differences we allow in humanity, the better off the universe will be. I cannot always prove these things, but I often have my reasons. What is fascinating is that cognitive psychologists note that people don't look at the reasons and form a conclusion, humans intuite a conclusion and then find the reasons for why they are right. We call this "confirmation bias."
Given all of this, since many beliefs out there fall outside of the scope of scientific inquiry, why not adopt the adaptive beliefs and drop the bad ones? I think any belief, when molded correctly, can be adaptive, and for me this has meant dropping a belief in God. For some, holding that there is a God is nourishing to them and can motivate them to be better people. For others, such a belief can create a superiority complex and give credence to the idea that other's need to conform to their beliefs, whatever the cost. For athiests, the belief that there is no God can be freeing, giving people the space to live freely and make new meanings for reality on their own terms in ways that can benefit the world. At its worst, athiests can look down on Christians as superstitious and perpetuate hate and biases against them, something I am often guilty of and trying to work on.
I think all of this leads to my primary point: that maybe there is no right or wrong stance on "unprovable beliefs", but that instead there are healthy and unhealthy adaptations of each. I've seen churches spread mental illness from generation to generation through fear and domineering tactics, but I have also seen churches build hospitals where others otherwise wouldn't. I think it matters less and less what a person believes about gods and ghosts, but what matters more is how those beliefs shape them and turn them into better versions of themselves, because the old christian argument carries weight that it does take faith to believe in an invisible God, but it also takes faith to not believe in one either. We intuite our beliefs, and that is our nature. Our nature is also to make meaning of the evidence we see, and maybe we can intuite different interpretations of reality, but consciously shift our tones to be more inclusive and caring about one another. Maybe at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what a person believes, but whether or not that belief makes them into a better version of themselves.
I was browsing the web looking for something cool to add to my neocity page of "cool websites" when I found "Pool Suite" which is basically an internet radio app that plays chill, retro, summer-type-vibes music. It's got me thinking about what I used to do before I moved back in with family. I remember I would go out on long rides with my boyfriend at night, driving the dark and crowded roads to get to the club our friends from around town were going to and we would just cozy up at a table and chill together. It was nice. I remember not liking going to clubs frequently, because my ears could only take so much music, and my joints so much dancing, but its something I am now nostalgic for.
I went on many adventures with my boyfriend, many that live vividly in my memory. I remember a lot of details from these episodes as if they happened in the 1980's, with how we dressed, and how I remember everyone else, but these memories were firmly grounded in the last year and a half. I remember a pool party we went to with like-minded furries and I remember hearing similar beats to the ones I am listening to right now. It was so nice because I would get to meet other queer folks just like me and feel a sense of connection with the outside world. Maybe I'll write about it more in another post, but sometimes I think that my subconscious has responded to a lot of life's trauma by ascribing at least partially to solipsism, and feeling deeply as if I am the only thing left alive in the cosmos after the trauma, though this is something I disagree with on a more conscious level. These parties would challenge this trauma-narrative and give me a space to feel connected to the world around me, rather than separate. But I digress.
When I was younger, and more ignorant, I used to judge people for their party lifestyle. I figured it was all the result of an addiction to pleasure or caving in to peer pressure. Having lived the other side, I understand it in a much more compassionate light. Life is dark, and a true understanding of reality means a firm grasp on how much life can suck. Not everything in the world is profound and full of meaning. Sometimes life is permeated with pain, monotomy, or a lack of personality. This can crush the soul, and sometimes one thing that can revive one's spirits (in the short term) is having these types of parties. When taken outside of the context of addiction (since parties can attract people with such struggles), I think the philosophy of a party is to simply stick it to life's face sometimes. "Yea, I know you suck a lot sometimes, but let me show you that I dare defy you and smile among all the hum drum." That's what my boyfriend was during those nights for me. He was a reminder that life is an adventure, even inbetween episodes of boredom, stress, and the death of personality in our world.
I cannot turn back the clock and go back to those alcohol filled parties, nor can I go outside of my home and find a similar setting to skinnydip at, but what I can do is lean into the music I am listening to right now and carry that defiant spirit with me in each step. "I got a thousand problems I don't care to list right now, and though I haven't found a solution to even one, I choose to dance as if I hadn't a single problem at all."