For me, depression is very much boiling the proverbial frog.

Unless there is some precipitating event, every week is just a little bit more difficult than the previous, but not so much so that I can’t managed basic activities. Instead, my energy is just slowly sapped until extraneous activities become difficult–and then impossible.

Emails sit for weeks, because they’ll take more than a single sentence reply, and I just can’t come up with that many words. Small insignificant tasks–like putting cards in an envelope to send–sit undone.

It’s aggravating as fuck, which only makes me feel worse, but it’s 100% a spoons issue. I have the mental capacity to go to work and get work done, but beyond that? Nope.

This has been sitting in my drafts folder for days, because it needs more, but, well, I can’t come up with anything.

So I’m gonna publish as is, which seems apt.

Something that the right conveniently ignores is how systemic racism has kept minorities from accumulating wealth in the same manner non-minorities have for decades.

Consider ghettos, which were originally areas where Jews were segregated. The modern sensibility no longer thinks of religious segregation when ghettos are mentioned, but as areas where poor brown people lived in public housing.

Except that really it’s the same thing.

Mar 20, 1945

…the said land or buildings theron shall never be rented, leased, or sold, transferred or conveyed to, nor shall the same be occupied exclusively by any negro or colored person or person of negro blood.

I regularly hear “conservatives” claim that people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (which is QUITE LITERALLY something that is defined as impossible) completely ignoring the systemic racism that forced minorities into these ghettos where poverty and violence thrived, and where even if someone wanted an education, what was available to them was in no way comparable to that available to children not trapped in ghettos.

Before it was torn apart by freeway construction in the middle of the 20th century, the Near North neighborhood in Minneapolis was home to the city’s largest concentration of African American families. That wasn’t by accident: As far back as the early 1900s, racially restrictive covenants on property deeds prevented African Americans and other minorities from buying homes in many other areas throughout the city.

What continues to astound me is that so many West Virginians–who should understand systemic and generational poverty because it is inherent across the state–are blind to the same forces that keep WV struggling doing to same to others.

It’s the same process. The same forces. The difference is that the majority of us in WV aren’t doubly burdened by out skin color.

Racial covenants were tools used by real estate developers in the 19th and 20th century to prevent people of color from buying or occupying property. Often just a few lines of text, these covenants were inserted into warranty deeds across the country. These real estate contracts were powerful tools for segregationists. Real estate developers and public officials used private property transactions to build a hidden system of American apartheid during the twentieth century.

For centuries, the powerful have used poverty and segregation to keep “undesirables” “in their place”. It’s why mine owners used company scrip and had company schools and fought the unions tooth and nail: so they could maintain their wealth by keeping workers from rising above their station.

I understand that white privilege is something that makes no sense to rural West Virginians, who have been struggling with generational poverty themselves and so feel as if they don’t have any privilege, so this must be some kind of bullshit.

But it’s not.

However, those in power are going to push the narrative that it is, to push division between groups that have so much in common, so they can continue to maintain power and increased their own wealth.

I don’t have any solutions. I don’t even have the personal strength to fight power.

But I’m tired of being quiet about it.

When Minneapolis Segregated (https://www.citylab.com/equity/2020/01/minneapolis-history-housing-discrimination-mapping-prejudice/604105/)
Mapping Prejudice (https://www.mappingprejudice.org/)

Guo Nian!

Happy Year of the Rat!

If you were born in a rat year, you are considered to have spirit, wit, alertness, delicacy, flexibility and vitality.

Not kidding.

This picture was November 2010:

Mind you, I did all the squares in about a month. Set everything aside for several years, put all the squares together in about a month. Set it aside for awhile. Did the backing and quilting two years ago, then waiting another two years (until today) before I finally bound the thing.

It wasn’t hard, it just took stretches of time where I wasn’t struggling mentally, and didn’t have anything else happening, and that was a bit of a rarity.

So unlikely to take on another quilt, but may well make clothes again (assuming I can find patterns and fabric).

There are certain technical words within every academic discipline that soon become stereotypes and cliches. Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any … It is the word “maladjusted.” This word is the ringing cry to modern child psychology. Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well?adjusted life …

But I say to you, my friends … there are certain things in our nation and in the world (about) which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, leave millions of G-d’s children smothering in an air tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self?defeating effects of physical violence.

I’m … convinced … that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment – men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation would not survive half?slave and half?free. As maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery would scratch across the pages of history words lifted to cosmic proportions, ‘We know these truths to be self?evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator certain unalienable rights’ that among these are ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’

Through such maladjustment, I believe that we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

Martin Luther King, Jr., at Western Michigan University, 18 December, 1963

I never make new year’s resolutions.

They don’t work for the majority of people, and I don’t need the guilt of failure.

But that doesn’t mean goals aren’t important.

I had a list of goals I wanted to achieve before I turned 40.

Thus I decided. What I want to do by the time I turn forty is to be comfortable with myself as I am. I want to be able to look in a mirror and be happy with what I see, and be comfortable in my own skin.

And I think I did okay! I learned how to put on makeup (even if I still never wear it), I learned how to deal with my hair, and I worked very hard to become comfortable with my body. The latter is still (of course) a work in progress, but I’m so much better at accepting myself as I am than I was in my 20s.

I achieved a lot over the past decade as well, aside from my goals. I went to Alaska (twice!), I left jobs that made me miserable and found a job I absolutely love, we hiked all the state parks and forests in WV, and I’ve learned a ton of new skills as I’ve taken on renovation and building projects I never would have considered myself capable of.

So I’m thinking about what goals I want to achieve by the time I’m fifty–which is this year.

So as part of my continuing goal of working to accept myself as I am, what might be some fun goals in the coming months, towards self-acceptance and becoming a better human.

Caveat: my mental health comes first, so it can’t be anxiety-inducing, or dangerous such as attempting tasks that are beyond me (sword-fighting with edged weapons (too clumsy), walking on a high wire (no sense of balance), memorizing pi (I can’t hold numbers in my brain), or becoming a portrait painter (I lack hand-eye coordination); you’ll note that a lot of things things are due to my lack of coordination–something I AM comfortable with.)

I’ve thought about a photo shoot. A friend of mine did one for her 50th and it was so lovely and marvelous and just accepting of her as she is. I’ve considered changing my fitness goals. I need more weight-wearing exercise, but I find it SO. BORING.

So any thoughts for goals I might set and or how I might achieve and change what I have been doing?