CW: cussing, reference to the hospitalizations of others and the near death experience of a friend, general ADHD neurodivergent executive disfunction fuckery, references to military violence, genocide, colonization, intergenerational trauma, Judenhass/antisemitism, racism, ethnic cleansing, homophobia, transphobia, homophobic violence, transphobic violence, anxiety, depression, depression as a side effect of a medical prescription, medications, reference to a suicide attempt of a Youtuber.
You’ve seen those videos. You know, the ones that go viral with the despondent person on the thumbnail and the wonderfully clickbait title of “Why I Quit YouTube”?
Welp, this post is a little like those videos.
Kinda.
I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not, but I need to start somewhere, especially since I haven’t been here in 5ever, and most of y’all are probs like ‘what in the everloving fuck?!’
A while back, I was in this very similar situation, in which I’d started a post quite like this one in early-mid 2023, because life and things happen, and I’d wanted to update y’all on some of those things in my life, both in the positive and negative, which contributed into me not posting. Such things had included, but were not limited to, my mom being hospitalized, one of my besties nearly dying during a medical procedure, another one of my besties being pregnant, and the wedding of a relative. I had also just wanted to get a post out in general because I didn’t really know which of the ones I’ve started I should prioritize and bloggity blog needed something. I’ve checked the date in my Google Drive that would tell me when I had last modified this post, which apparently was July 21, 2023, and I had given it the shitty placeholder title of “Updates, Apologies and Interactive Request thingies.”
Since I did actually want to update everyone on certain things, and to apologize for neglecting the bloggity blog, I had also figured that maybe some community interaction would help me update more regularly as an ADHD human that struggles with executive function, prioritization and organization, wherein external motivation and factors are the most helpful for me, because I really did (and still do) want to post on here more often. I was going to ask something along the lines of y’all leaving comments on my posts for requests of things I’d discussed before, or I’d have polls where I would leave titles and/or topics for everyone to vote on that would be the most interesting for y’all to see. I just wanted something that would help me get back into writing for my lovely bloggity blog.
And then came October 7th, 2023.
And with it the exponential increase and progression of the genocidal violence against Palestine and its people.
This shifted my feelings and focus in a great many ways.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but as a Jewish human with intergenerational trauma, a degree in linguistics that’s leveled up my understanding of how people manipulate language to make themselves feel better about doing awful things, and, as far as I can tell, some semblance of compassion, it felt wrong to me to just go about posting whatever ADHD brainthought I had while being silent about the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestine being used as a guise of ‘protecting Jews.’
Perhaps it’s also my fire sign energy. Or maybe it’s because I’m an enneagram type 1 or something. Hell, perhaps it could be the intersection with my queerness that knows for a fact that I would still not have equal rights, and therefore continue to experience oppression, if I made aliyah, and therefore, Israel is not actually about and/or for the Jewish people, as it claims.
Although, I gotta say, I’m pretty sure most of it is the Jewish part of me that didn’t want to be like bystanders during the Holocaust who just sat the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and went along with everything mainstream media and the government said and did, which contributed to said Holocaust, because ‘don’t ruin Thanksgiving by talking about politics’ or whatever.
As a neurodivergent human, I am bad at words on the fly, so when I attempted to use my voice and raise awareness on messaging apps and the socials, I sucked at it. Like I’ve previously discussed in my first (and probs also third) blog post, messaging and social apps have historically been absolute shite in getting my in depth thoughts and points across in a meaningful, well constructed way, which is a chronic anxiety that I have, and is why I even started doing the bloggity blog in the first place. Because of this, in messaging apps and social media posts, I generally try to include references and links to organizations and books of those whose voices are not really being heard and need to be uplifted to help not just them, but also me in doing what I feel like I cannot on the fly. As those don’t also necessarily help the most either, especially depending on whether or not people actually investigate and go through all of the links, attachments and such, I had then hoped that a blog post could do what the other things could not.
And so I tried.
I tried three times.
The first attempted post was to go with my Social Justice Geometry Proof series. It contained a mathematical proof I’d started on how political Zionism, as well as the State of Israel itself, is the antithesis of Judaism, and is, therefore, inherently antisemitic – which is already 15 points, by the way. This post also included a design I made for a Jewish flag that wasn’t associated with doing ethnic cleansing, violent, government sponsored and endorsed colonialism, and/or militant nationalism inspired by the Global North and Western world – i.e., the State of Israel – to help curb the unfortunate, insidious association of Judaism and the entirety of the Jewish people with said State of Israel and the atrocities that which created and maintain it.
I literally worked on that post for three months straight. It’s 18 pages. I’d spent more time and care on that post than I’d ever spent on any school paper in my entire life, and I STILL felt like I didn’t have everything I wanted to include, and therefore it wasn’t enough.
And while trying to get all the thoughts, sources, and a literal bibliography in order, other Jewish people who are FAR more eloquent than I am, have read way more about it, done more research, gotten degrees related to the topic, and have even had closer, more personal experiences related to all this have been using their voices to speak out, do the work, and bring awareness.
That all made me feel like this attempt at my blog post would be – which, in turn, made me feel – entirely useless.
(ADHDBrain Sidenote: For any of you who are interested, some of those Jewish sources and places to begin looking include Simone Zimmerman of IfNotNow, the members of Tikkun Olam Productions with their documentary ‘Israelism’, the Maté family (which includes Dr. Gabor Maté, a Holocaust survivor who then went on to study childhood trauma because of that), Shatzi Weisberger (z”l), Noam Chomsky (particularly ‘Manufacturing Consent,’ which I’m currently reading and have vaguely referenced earlier), Ilan Pappé, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Rabbi Brant Rosen, Rabbi Alissa Wise, Hadar Cohen, Sim Kern, Sheryl Weikal, and Isabella Segalovich.
- Related side note, if all you do is go to the one link that I posted in this section per person/group, and don’t look through/read/watch any other of their books, articles, podcasts, videos, interviews, etc., and/or look into the works of the Palestinian artists and scholars that they mention, you’re not actually doing the work, and are probably not really as interested as you claim to be.)
My second attempt was actually going to be a speculative fiction of sorts.
Many a time, queer humans get people claiming that they would ‘be thrown off buildings by Hamas,’ so why the fuck are they pro-Palestine? This annoys the absolute shit out of me, because 1) most of those people have never said or done anything about any of the anti-queer laws and bans that’ve been going on in their own country, so they don’t actually give a shit about queerphobia and are just saying that to be vaguely threatening and shut them up, and 2) I could also get thrown off a building in Miami by Ronald McDonald DeSantis, and yet I still don’t want Florida to be blown to bit and pieces. I have friends there, ya know, and that’s where BooknetFest is, so why the fuck would I want that?
Since people love to throw out queerphobia as a perfectly valid reason to be okay with carpet bombing civilians, it made me think of how, much like Jewish people, us queer folk have been marginalized for the entirety of ever. So, don’t we deserve a place to call home that’s “free of homophobia?” Don’t we deserve a country where we’re the majority population?
So what if we did that for the gays? What if we got them all to ship off to Lesbos or whatever to make a “safe haven” for them?…except there are people that already live there. There are actual citizens in Lesbos who have homes and lives on that land, but because this is supposed to be gay country, the majority of the population is to be gay, therefore we’d have to do something about the indigenous Lesbians that are already there.
Basically, the point would’ve been if there was a version of the State of Israel for the gays, everyone – well, not everyone, the piece would’ve explored that a little bit – would be (rightfully) pissed the fuck off.
(Important ADHDSidenote: FOR THE RECORD – because I REALLY feel like I need to point this out for a plethora of reasons, but particularly per this tweet about how Sci-Fi/Dystopian novels and stories demonstrate reasons as to why certain things should not happen, and yet, for some reason, people decide we should probs do it anyway – I DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THIS TO OR THINK THIS SHOULD HAPPEN, AND IT ABSOLUTELY SHOULD FUCKING NOT, and the story very much would have shown why.)
That one eventually got nixed because then the ADHDbrain spiralled into backstory, characters, and how their perspectives would represent real world arguments, events, and experiences that have happened, which a) would’ve devolved into a series I never intended for in the long run, b) might have required a specific sensitivity reader, which is fine, I just didn’t know who or where to go to in order to get that specific one, and, with that said, c) therefore might not have been my story to tell.
So then I decided to try, as my third attempt, to do one just talking about my experience on the ‘Birthright’ trip, and how that basically led me to Antizionism, which, long story short, was how I wanted Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha, and instead I got BS mainstream partying and hook-up culture.
Okay, admittedly, that is a bit of an exaggeration, because I really did enjoy my time, and my purpose for doing it had slightly been fulfilled. However, for the most part, I didn’t get what I was looking for on that trip, which just left me with confusion and more questions that weren’t answered until, oddly enough, getting involved in the Bookternet.
Eventually, I needed to take a break from working on these posts because, as I didn’t have all the things I wanted for any of them and didn’t know exactly where to go, I was incredibly overwhelmed by them all. I’d wanted to, and even had, reached out to people who I have no business reaching out to for their help with information and their opinions on posts. But then time passed, because I either didn’t have the stones to reach out to certain people, hear anything back from some people that I had, or get a response that would’ve been helpful (and no shade, shame or hatred to any of those specific people if they ever read this; you were (and are) all very lovely and wonderful and thank you, and I think I maybe gotta tag any ADHD impulsiveness I may have had on even trying to reach out to you regarding this topic in the first place, wherein I apologize to y’all personally for being a twat).
I didn’t know what else to do, which then resulted in me not going back to those posts because it seemed like too long – even though it really isn’t cuz it’s still happening. Adding that to the general neurodivergent anxiety, overwhelm, and all-or-nothing perfectionism that’s kept me from going back to those posts has, of course, once again, made me feel entirely useless.
Yup. Those were my three attempts at that, and so, because I wanted that to be my post before writing about anything else since I didn’t feel right going on about life as if nothing was happening and people weren’t committing and contributing to literal genocide using my – and for some, their own – cultural heritage and history as some sort of justification, bloggity blog was woefully neglected.
There are, of course, other things that have happened in my life of course that kept me from posting. I started T, and also another prescription medication for my skin that literally put me in such a depression I didn’t want to move, just to name a couple. There was also a big part of me that wanted to try and focus on fiction, as I would eventually like to get published, whether it be through traditional publishing or indie, which then meant that bloggity blog was the lowest on the writing prioritization tier ranking.
And all of this has, as I vaguely mentioned at the beginning, once again made me feel all the anxieties and things where I’m just spending my money on this tiny astral speck of barely used data in the void of the digital space that, maybe, vaguely flashes in one’s peripheral vision for a hot second then fucks off, and not doing anything with it, which makes brain do the spiralling thing.
As an ADHDbrained human whose brain does the referenced spiralling thing, believe it or not, background noise actually helps me focus a bit more, and so I usually have YouTube videos going on to keep me grounded. A Youtuber I’ve been following recently is Daniel Howell, who is an oldie (I’m older than him, lol. And yes, he is one of those with the type of Youtube video I mentioned earlier, lol again), but a very goodie.
While I do have some of his videos as background noise, one I can’t do that with is his comedy special ‘We’re All Doomed.’ It is a show that is somehow both overly dramatic and yet very dry, and both incredibly pessimistic but also inspiringly hopeful. It’s two hours, and live with audience interaction – which is why I can’t just have it as background noise – that has several messages that really hit hard, hit home and must be watched and listened to whenever the video comes on because they are excellent emotional reminders that deserve one’s full attention, some of which are partial inspirations for this “comeback” post of mine, if you will.
As per the title, his show is about how the world in general, as well as specific things that make and are a part of our society, sucks…a lot, and is destined for failure and destruction. Towards the end of the show, he discusses how many of us laypeople of the world want to try to make things better, but we really can’t due to the whole fascy capitalist oligarchy thing we’ve got going on, hence why the world sucks and is destined for destruction. He talks about how so many people have actually become hypernormalized to all of it, so they won’t do anything and just go about things as it is because, ya know, it is what it is and we can’t do anything about it so why even try?
But then he mentions his time in school and how he’d constantly been bullied for being gay (he wasn’t out and/or didn’t even know he was gay at the time, but bullies are gonna bully and homophobes are gonna homophobe). He talks about how if just one person had stood up for him when that was happening, maybe he wouldn’t have tried to kill himself. So even if just one person makes the tiniest noise, and that noise can help someone feel seen and give them hope, uplifting people’s voices, speaking up and speaking out is still so fucking important. We still have to live our lives in our shitty society, and despite having very little faith that that will change, he still wants better the world, he still wants and hopes for said change, and if his show helps just one person watching, then it’s worth it.
So with his message to the world, as well as a stark, kick in the face reminder per my first post, I gotta keep on going on here if it helps even just one of you, and also remember – and maybe help y’all remember – that just because any of us haven’t finished or worked on something in a hot damn minute means it’s over forever and we can never come back to it.
Hopefully my therapist would be proud.
So here is this post to make whatever tiny noise it can, as well as a little bit of an update on how I think I’d like bloggity blog to work going forward.
My original intent for this blog was mostly meant as a kind of-sort of diary to chain together all of the thoughts in my ADHDBrain on the tin, as it were. However, ADHD brain has the fiction and story thoughts, as well, and, as I mentioned before, has wanted to prioritize that.
But also, however, as someone who is involved in the Bookternet, and therefore sees a lot of things about traditional publishing, I feel like some of my creative writing fictional projects wouldn’t do very well in that realm, but I still love them and want them to exist.
So, I’m thinking I’m maybe going to expand bloggity blog a little bit to include them. Well, at least some of them.
Now, I’m not the most tech savvy, but I’ve tried to update my website a little bit in order to organize my posts a bit more and better, so there now includes a whole ass fiction section which will hopefully make it easier for people to find. However, as I am not the most tech savvy, the navigating stories and things on here might be a bit confusing and dicey along the way, but I would like to try and see what I can do to make it not like that, so stay tuned, I guess.
That’s all for now methinks. Again, apologies for the unintentional hiatus, and I hope you’ll stick with me for future posts, regardless of them being ADHD thoughts about our IRL world or the worlds that exist in the electrical synapses of the two brain cells I have that I occasionally rub together.
I hope you’re doing as well as can be in this strange, unfortunate timeline of ‘Thunder and Blazes’ basically becoming the new national anthem of the United States and the irony behind that.
But, like the message of Daniel Howell’s show, we’re still here, and we still have to partake in society, so let’s do it together with some semblance of hope for a better future.
Thank you, if you’re still reading this, and if you need some sort of affirmation for yourself or the world, take these words from ‘We’re All Doomed’:
“Embrace the void, and have the courage to exist.”
~Mackenzie Brynn Rap
IDEK My ADHD[REDACTED] Brain Has A Lot of Thoughts Here They Are You Don't Have To Care 