Challenges are created for a variety of reasons. This one I had end on my dad's would be 90th birthday because he was a liar I chose to love.

I like to find new folks to follow- I sometimes am seeking an echo of something I want to see if exists somewhere and other times I am just silly and want to interact with folks.

I did not get to read as things went, I was 'saving them up' to read on the 3rd and work and time did not permit- so instead I had the opportunity to sit today and read all 31 entries. I am not sure exactly what I expected... but this was a beautiful few hours of experience in bravery, honestly, and just outright wonderful writing. Thank you for that.

Should you get the time, I suggest you get a cup of your favorite anything, your pet if you have one and read the entries from the challenge 'who is a person you chose to love' and see, if like I did, you find a piece of yourself in some of the entries and you learn something. If that is not something you have time for- I will leave you with this:

writers self proclaimed liars - the majority

writers loved a liar who abused them - less only by 1 than the majority

writers love a family member who is a liar - 3rd most common

writers simply see the world as a collection of liars - least number

Not one entry on the lies of the establishment, politics, institutions, religion, or media... and though I believe 3 not in any of the lists to just be story tellers of lies, for the most part all those who went to task felt a personal relationship to a liar; be it self or other. We seem to truly be less phased by 'the world' which offers up non-stop lies and which is a scapegoat of the masses when need be, than we are by (in one way or another) ourselves and those we wanted to love.

This was something I am not sure I expected, and I appreciated all who participated.

We were married for fifteen years, and the problems snuck in like a thief in the night. I didn't think she wanted me, she didn't think I wanted her, and this built up for years until it was actually true. Before the absolute end, when we couldn't stand one another anymore, I realized it had been a lie for years. The lie was I was the only one she ever needed.

It started with her taking a trip to visit her family up north without me. She just so happened to meet her old summertime boyfriend. They were talking, catching up, reminiscing, and then he leaned in to kiss her, and she kissed back. She didn't tell me right away, not until a week or so after she got back. I honestly wasn't mad at first, who doesn't kiss someone when they are being kissed? But as I thought about as my marriage fell apart, she could have stopped him as he came in for the kiss, pushed him back, turned away. But she wanted that kiss because it made her feel pretty. it made her feel wanted.

I know what you're thinking. I should have made her feel those things. I tried, I honestly did. She never believed me, ever. When I told her I thought she was sexy, or pretty, or anything, she ALWAYS responded with, "You have to say that, you're my husband." How was I ever supposed to convince her how I felt if she was never going to believe me?

The second step to the downfall of my marriage was Tumblr, before they banned all porn. She wrote softcore erotica and posted pictures of herself. Her stories were very good, I thought. Her pictures were also good. She loved the attention they got her, and I hated that she needed that attention from so many other men.

Tumblr porn was shut down. Her final words to her audience were, "I've never felt beautiful or desirable before I posted my pictures. I've never felt talented or confident enough to share my writings with anyone before here. Hope I find somewhere else to play."

What the actual fuck?

I always encouraged her writing. Everything I read, I told her what I liked and didn't like, but it was mostly positive. I always desired her, since we started dating in college. She said I was the only one for her. LIE!! But she hadn't taken pictures lie those for me before Tumblr. She hadn't flirted with me, or sexted with me. She said I was the only one for her, but I was never enough.

Things went downhill from there pretty fast. She moved to MeWe, joined online groups with names like "Tease Me, Please Me", "Footwear Fetish", and "Tits Out Tuesday". She flirted with guys in her groups. She went on virtual dates with them, where they would watch a movie together and sext each other. I was just a pay check she was living off. She said she would have left me long ago if she had anywhere to go. Somewhere showed up soon enough when one of her online friends offered her cheap rent in one of their homes in Raleigh, North Carolina, miles away from me. She handed me divorce papers the day before I had to go in for a surgery.

I didn't fight the divorce, I was just ready to be done with her lies, and mine as well. That I could ever be enough once she had her sexual awakening, that she ever loved me or just that I was a provider. That I could fix things if I just accepted her new self. I tried, but I couldn't do it. I loved her, but I could take the lies anymore.

Named after a country singer, and a trouble maker from the start. Toddling around flushing stuffed animals down the toilet and spreading peanut butter on the walls. "It wasn't me mom." A child's lie, simple. Age pulled him forward, a beltline of drugs, girls, and bad influences passing in front of him. "No, that's not mine. No, I don't know her. No, I was just with the boys on Friday, no one else." A teenager's lie, nearly harmless. Then, a man, going through life sporadically. "Are you on pills?" "No, I'm fine, don't worry. Everything's okay." "Were you drunk driving?" "No, I'm fine, don't worry. Everything's okay." "Are you eating?" "Yes, I'm fine, don't worry. Everything's okay." "Are you okay buddy?" "Yes, I'm fine, don't worry. Everything's okay." Adult lies, scary. I love him. I try to swallow the lies. I try to love him enough that he'll tell me the truth. Please tell me the truth.

-Your little sister

You lie on a bed of it,

your grin fastened to your neck with cheap gauze

and whatever else was on sale;

close, comfortable.

You lie for your little brothers,

for your extremities and

for nothing at all.

You lie because you know I will catch you.

Because you know I already have;

from before your neurons curled

infant fists around the mere whisper of a notion.

You lie,

You confront yourself in the black of a loading laptop

in a third world internet cafe; the heat like a hug.

You lie.

You confess your sins to the screen.

You claim to forgive yourself; in verse like a hug.

You lie about that too.

Smart but not smart enough. Athletic but not good enough to play in college. Cute but not pretty.

I was a confident child. I was told daily how smart, athletic, and pretty I was.

"She'll make the boys crazy one day" strangers would tell my mother.

"I bet you'll be a lawyer like your daddy" my grandma would say with a proud smile.

It's easy to feel successful when your accomplishments aren't your own. Sure, people think you're smarter than everyone when your reading specialist mother has you reading novels by the time you're in first grade. Of course they think you're a born athlete when your rugby-player dad has you in the yard throwing pitch after pitch until you throw harder than girls twice your size.

Then you get to high school. Your teacher recommends you for honors calculus instead of advanced-placement and it feels like your world is crashing. That's the first time you see disappointment in your parents' eyes. You don't make the school softball team and have to play travel instead. You graduate, and your parents note all the cords around your friends necks.

"Where are yours?" they ask.

You finally make it to college- not with a scholarship like your friends got but at least you're going. You gather the courage to get out of your shell after being invisible for so many years. You notice that you don't get attention from boys the way other girls do. You aren't cut out for pre-med- you need to switch majors. You watch your parents' faith in you fade as they switch their focus onto your younger sister.

I should have everything I need to be happy. I'm smart enough to get a good, average job. I play on the club rugby team. I have a few close friends and a boyfriend who loves me.

I know deep down that this will never be enough. I want to make a difference in the world through my career. I want to be the best player on my team. I want everyone to love me.

My biggest obstruction is being an ordinary person who was raised to be extraordinary.

I don't smoke but I've been eyeing these smokeless "essential oil" inhalers with a lot of temptation. I can't use one, I'm allergic to generally every form of fragrance on the planet - can't breathe it or wear it - so it's a fantasy notion, the idea of having something to fixate my anxiety on that looks cool and doesn't cause cancer that we know of yet.

Anxiety is a nasty word I've learned to live with lately, but not as bad as other words I've dealt with including "depression" "breakdown" and - the utterly last word I ever want to hear again - "bipolar". I lovingly refer to it as my family curse, in about the same way one might refer to lycanthropy; it runs in the tree and you pray to God you never manifest it but every full moon you get nervous and start to wonder. In therapy my psych kindly suggested that I didn't seem "bipolar" - but perhaps I suffered because I'd been raised by a mother who was. Little did this psych realize that by scapegoating the very same parent whose curse I dreaded to bear they put a lynchpin in my decision to stop pursuing children via IVF and thus kick off the end of my marriage of twelve years. Because if simply having a "bipolar" parent can cause such turmoil, then why on earth would I subject another human to the same? Or worse, see them turn into a monster one day just like me?

[For the record despite my mother's diagnosis I am a very loved and spoiled child - never beaten or abused - and hence my rather loyal ire at having my mother scapegoated when she should have been better supported during her own breakdown, and I should have received help too. Notice how even among doctors the stigma of their labels persists.]

I don't talk about my family curse, obviously. It's been my experience people will quickly start to put you into stereotypes and boxes as soon as you present one. Suddenly "Oh, that's why you do that" or "You always did seem so and so" will start to trickle into conversations and you become less a person and more a walking statistic. A werewolf only achieves acceptance by staying in human form and passing for normal.

When I brought up my monstrous metaphor to a friend, after sadly failing to keep the wolf at bay during COVID and other life stressors, they kindly suggested I find the gypsy who cursed my family and get them to lift the curse. They didn't see my curse as a defining personality trait; instead, they had also suffered mental health issues and knew - as I did - that it sucks trying to advocate for yourself in a sea of labels and medications. Yet never had it occurred to me to look more carefully at the curse I'd accepted on my family all those years ago. Intrigued, I took an abnormal psychology course and decided to learn "gypsy".

It was an utterly fascinating and horrifying eight week journey.

The gist of what I gleaned from my semester in psych is this: Psychology is fucking $@!%-t. Over half of all psychiatrists don't even practice it anymore; they just prescribe pills. Which have gained popularity as the "biomedical model" of science continues to push the idea that mental illness is a problem of the person suffering it, not the society or circumstances they find themselves in. Except there isn't actually any concrete physical evidence for mental illness as a biological problem. You may read studies that suggest "oh no there's a genetic factor" or "there's a chemical imbalance" but the actual truth exposed by journalists who finally looked through the reports paid for by pharmaceuticals who have nearly quadrupled their clientele over the past few decades have found that actually, in fact, these ideas are not fully proven yet.

The "chemical imbalance" theory sounds good on paper - your brain simply isn't producing the right stuff, that's the problem - however where it breaks down is the fact that 1) it was disproven 25 years ago but mental health professionals didn't feel the need to share that info with the public because it made prescribing meds easier if they believed they were the problem 2) the chemical imbalances that do exist are actually caused by the medications doctors prescribe you when you're diagnosed; and since there are increasingly fewer unmedicated patients nowadays there are no longer any controls to compare to for any studies that continue to refer to these imbalances.

The brain, once prescribed any of the multitude of drugs pushed by psych wards and often forced upon the homeless or the incarcerated, actually changes structure as it tries to adapt to the new chemicals. This process is called "homeostasis" and generally refers to your body trying hard to keep things status quo. When a chemical starts to block serotonin, for example, your brain will create more receptors to absorb it anyway. In a short period of time your brain absorbs more serotonin than normal and the initial imbalance the doctor suggested you had is now reality. These changes progress and cause the doses to rise up and the condition to worsen. Since the use of lithium to treat bipolar started back in the early 80's, for example, the number of bipolar patients recovering from a manic episode has dropped from over 70% to less than 33%. The drugs make us worse, not better. Probably because none of them are actually developed to treat mental illness because - again - they can't find any physical cause for it. They are instead simply uppers, downers, and sedative derivatives that wreck havoc in the receptors of our grey matter and leave us worse off for it. Or, as a wise man put it, they are a thousand different types of aspirin to ease symptoms, not cure a disease. Placebos actually have a higher success rate than most anti-depressants.

The problem with relying on "genetic" factors for mental illness overlooks the contributing factors of intergenerational trauma + learned behavior/coping skills, all of which pass down from one generation to the next with about the same regularity as genes but could actually be a case of nurture more than nature. If one of your family members is ever diagnosed the only genetic testing they do to see if you've got the same issue is to ask about your family history. I was once actually told by a therapist not to give my family history to an intake psychiatrist, because it only made them lazy about diagnosing my symptoms (which they do in only 10 minutes of talking to you because time is money in hospitals). For further evidence my brother - who was also committed at one point for a mental breakdown - did not know to tell the doctors of our family's "bipolar" curse and was diagnosed with "schizophrenia" instead. Which begs the question - is my family really "bipolar" or "schizophrenic"? Furthermore they haven't found the gene for anything yet - including "bipolar" disorder - even though they're sure it's there. The idea that we can genetically treat mental illness is even further away than the ridiculous attempts we've made at medicating it.

The DSM - The Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - is updated every few decades by a board of psychiatrists of whom about 60% have their research fully funded by drug companies. With each iteration of the DSM, the criteria for meeting a set disorder are widened such that new cases often triple within the first year of the manual's publication. Interesting how one book can cause such a huge wave of mental illness. A few psychologists have decried the obvious clash of interests, however the industry persists and there's been little progress made since removing homosexuality as a disorder from the DSM in 1974; feeling distress over being homosexual wasn't removed until 2013.

Which begs the question - exactly what is mental illness and what causes it? Well, the insanely simple suggestion posed by my teacher is that it's natural and it's caused by the world continuing to suck. One of the key points made over and over is that mental illness is always defined by society - and sadly, society often overrides the needs of the individual for the needs of the system when it's meant to be the other way around. Often people who are "mentally ill" are struggling with intense trauma or life circumstances; PTSD - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - for example is being rebranded now as PTSI - Post Traumatic Stress Injury - because the problem isn't in the person, it's in the situation that broke them. We send soldiers to war then treat them as invalids for witnessing its horrors. We have children suffer attack or abuse then treat them as mentally defective for surviving it. We ignore the loss of home, stability, and community in the homeless population and treat them as if magically they can overcome these basic human needs and function as a sane person while living on the street. Yet in each of these instances the focus is on treating the victim rather than addressing the flaws in our social systems that hurt them. War could be avoided. Families could be better supported in our communities. Housing costs could be regulated. However what will more likely happen is the victim-blaming of those dealing with these larger social evils than society making any meaningful change.

The crazy thing about mental health is that Western scientists literally bend over backwards to ignore everything outside the brain including social background, economic status, race, sex, culture, the whole gamut of overall health and wellness - to focus exclusively on little synapses and genetic coding. The obvious problem with this approach is that our brain isn't disconnected from everything around it. Far from it; in fact, they've proven that subtle changes including light, temperature, social isolation, and diet can all influence one's mood and mental health. Moreover the W.E.I.R.D. - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic - countries all have the worst track record for mental illness. And unfortunately they're exporting it, through the paid advocacy of pharmaceutical-funded psychiatrists and increasing Western media coverage of what are increasingly now global disorders including depression, anxiety, anorexia, etc.

As for my stigma - my obstacle, the wolfsbane of my family tree? It's still there. Even after this eye-opening learning of the system that failed three generations of my family and branded us monsters. Curses don't die when you learn the gypsy lied. Because curses live in the continued beliefs of the angry mobs and villagers who listen to them.

And as I pack up the last of my things to move to a small apartment in a brand new city in the boonies (where I can afford to live on a single paycheck) while saying goodbye to friends and places I've known, I eye that homeopathic alternative to smoking and wonder if I had smoked whether it would have eased the anxiety for all those years growing up with a family struggling to cope with mental health issues. Or if it simply would have given me one more obstacle to beat.

Further Suggested Reading for Mental Health Issues In America:

Mad in America: https://www.madinamerica.com/blogs/

This is a blog covering the many failings and critiques of the mental healthcare system, including personal stories from people who have survived it

*If you're not a reader, the main founder/editor of Mad in America, Robert Whitaker, has a series of YouTube videos summarizing his research/findings in the mental health care system from his book Anatomy of an Epidemic, the first part of which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R6MXO2j0V0

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

This is a fascinating book that delves into how culture informs madness, and how the way we diagnose and describe mental health in society can impact how it manifests among us.

Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

This is a perhaps overly optimistic book by the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health that takes a critical look at America's mental healthcare system and its failings, as well as some suggestions for fixing it.

Worrying

That's all I do

I worry that you're all I have to lose

That all my fears are facts of life

Every scenario of all the bad

An escape plan for when things go wrong

A negative whisper in my ear

For all the things people don't say

And every time I take a step into the light

Cold hands embrace me and drag me back

Shielding me from sight

So around in circles, I go

A road unknown ahead

But I'm always stuck here

My head tells me it's best not to follow

And I know it's right

but I desperately want to feel the light

I was never born with any gifts,

so people said I won't succeed,

as the world is too competitive,

and hard to survive.

So I developed my own gifts,

first one being mind- reading.

I'm not psychic, but I observe,

how others act and talk; and

ultimately what they think.

The second is my perseverance.

I preserve until I succeed as

it is the key to the success,

that many people never sees.

The next of course is my writings.

I write off all my emotions;

be it ecstasy or despair,

I write and keep them aside,

in order to protect my mindfulness.

These are my gifts to stay afloat.

Now everyone says I'll survive,

no matter where or when,

as it is my best gift- survival skills.

POWER!!!!

Is that what you said you want

Cant’ you see that I’m busy, Please do not bother me with such nonsense

….

Fine if you are not going to leave tell me what kind of power do you want

The power to do what you want when you want

Not to be controlled by the media and swayed depending on the narrative

You want to escape the matrix that gives you power huh

Well you either been watching to many movies or too much Andrew Tate

Either can get you in trouble if you believe to deep

But fine I can give you the answer to obtain the power that you want

There are two ways to obtain it, you are not equip to do either

The first way Tate is actually right about

Money obtain enough money where the rules don’t apply to you

It doesn’t matter how you obtain it drugs, stealing, business, off the backs of slaves in other countries

Once you obtain a certain amount of wealth the way you obtained it stops mattering

This way is slow and takes a lot of effort

So here’s an easier way for you, give up everything

Quit your job, sell all possessions, give away all your money, cut off all your connections

Do that and you’ll get the power you want.

I know what your thinking how will give you power

You see being ultra wealthy or extremely poor is the same type of power

The power is the same, the lifestyle is different

The wealthy can go where they want, be who they want, the freedom of choice

The misfits of the population can do the same

No one pays attention to the dirt on the street

Youd be free to move how you want, be who you want, it’s the freedom of choice

Think hard about the difference, besides the material things it’s the same

I don’t have the time to explain it to you

Because see you imagine a certain lifestyle that comes with power

But that lifestyle is not power it’s only a possible byproduct of power

The one thing you can never to with you want to obtain power is

To confuse money with power, those things are not interchangeable

You may have money, but that does not mean you have power

Often it’s the opposite the more money you have the less power you have over your life

Sure there’s some billionaires who have money and power

But think of the majority of those with money

The influencers, the actors, the singers, athletes, etc……

What power do they hold, they can’t go where they want, they can’t say what they want, they can’t step out line

OR poof everything’s gone

That’s not power, it’s just a nice form of slavery

A slave to the people

A slave to one master or a slave to a million masters, is still the same slave

So if you want power, THEN STRIVE FOR POWER

Money come and go, people come and go, but power once you obtain it and understand how to obtain it

That stays Forever

Socrates was one of the most powerful philosphophers ever and extremely poor

Yet people followed him, because power isn’t conveyed by what you see

It’s conveyed by what you can make the people FEEL

So go let me see what POWER you can obtain

I see people in a small cafe next to my tiny apartment.

An elderly couple with matching gray for their hair, greet each other with a peck on lips. I wonder what they tasted then? He must have tasted the faint bitterness of the coffee she was sipping earlier, and she dry staleness because he drank a whole glass of water as he sat.

A very busy barista with pouty lips, and golden hair. Few of those golden strands stuck to her neck because of the sweat she was oozing out. She must taste like lipsticks, and fresh salt. Her eyes catch the glimpse of a tall figure.

A tall man with a neat gray stubble, in a gray polo and green khakis has an aura around him. Everybody in that small cafe could smell his presence, I am sure he tastes like sandalwood and sophistication.

A poet in me is bored of my own taste. I wonder how I taste like, to other people. Do people miss kissing me, as I miss kissing people?