I try always to be honest. Always.
To the best of my ability, I try to never lie and I'm generally not good at lying and I don't really want to get good at it.
I've talked before on this blog about coming out as "very heteropassing" or "not straight" in part to serve as an advocate for the LGBTQ crowd. But I also have this very deep belief that unnecessarily deceiving people makes the world a fundamentally worse place because it fosters insanity.
It makes it tough for people to figure out how to live their lives if they are looking to you as a role model and they believe X about you and X is not true.
Though the older I get, the harder I try to err on the side of protecting my privacy and have made my peace with the idea that telling The Truth doesn't obligate me to to tell The WHOLE Truth and overshare to the same degree I once did.
It often isn't even good communication. More details is sometimes an exercise in distracting from your point, not clarifying it.
Sadly, no amount of honesty or accuracy prevents other people from running my words through their warped minds and going weird places I never intended to go and this post is intended to TRY to clarify a few things. Billy Joel is such a great artist. I'm sure I never want to meet the man behind the music. It would likely be a huge disappointment.
His work is brilliant and seems very personal and heart-felt and wise but it is his work. It is what he chooses to share of himself for pay, and that doesn't mean I actually know ANYTHING about the man at all as a private person, as an individual.
The world seems to really have trouble with that concept.
It has so much trouble with distinguishing the private person from their work that Janet Jackson was secretly married for years to the man she was OPENLY living with to preserve the sex appeal of her work and the movie Marilyn and Me suggests that Marilyn Monroe had a secret marriage to someone who probably really loved her and was forced by studio executives to not only end it but cover it up so thoroughly the movie reads like a variation on The Titanic movie where an unprovable, fictitious story was attached to a publicly known thing.
People the world over want to imagine they have a PERSONAL and SPECIAL relationship to famous people whose work speaks to them and this is the essence of fandom and it's part of how some people get rich, by selling their work to the many strangers who have never met them yet want to feel they have a special connection to the artist.
Decades ago, people like Marilyn Monroe were SEEN by a LOT of people on the big screen or whatever but likely most of the time had very private lives similar to any other person with a job. Their public image could be curated to a degree that it cannot be today. With 8 billion people on planet earth AND cell phones and internet, it's impossible to live anything resembling a "normal" life and be famous.
And I know I am not just imagining this. I saw a musician talk about how he could do huge sold-out stadium venues and make tons of money and have his music all over the radio and walk down the street in his hometown without security and not be recognized by anyone as a famous musician.
And then MTV came along and the era of adding huge video screens to the stage so people in the back row could see your face in great and glorious detail while you sang and suddenly he couldn't have a normal life anymore. That deal was over. That life was GONE.
I have an ENTIRE website dedicated to my hypothesis that women get groomed from birth to have a PRIVATE role in life as a full-time wife and mom and men get groomed from birth to have a PUBLIC role in life, to have a career which qualifies them for having a full-time wife taking care of all their personal needs from sex to cooking to cleaning and anything else they may need.
I think this trips up men and women equally with regards to the world trying to find other answers, answers that will allow women to have real careers and aspire to other things. I think women very often don't know where to draw that line and men may not know that women don't know and need help and often men wouldn't know themselves how to help women with this issue because men often just don't share themselves honestly with ANYONE, even their wife, and wives accept that because he may have a security clearance or NDA at work and even if he doesn't, people won't hire him if they think he repeats every single thing to his wife.
That's usually not a thing people talk about. It's implicit. It's just understood and it creates this invisible barrier that I increasingly believe is a large factor in the so-called glass ceiling.
It's really hard to sort out where to draw or redraw those lines in part because there often is no clear, bright line between the person and their work. For people like politicians who are in positions of public trust, we routinely want to know if they are trustworthy and trying to sort out if they are a person of good character often means trying to figure out something about their personal life because "Character is what we do when we think no one is watching."
Even in the case of art, good art speaks to us. We value art not merely as superficial and harmless entertainment but also for the life lessons we can learn in a non-threatening fashion, for the ability to talk about hard subjects and so forth in a way that lets the audience decide just how much they want to engage with the tough pieces of it.
It's not like paying a therapist or taking a college class. No one is going to grade you, judge you, expect or demand a certain level of effort or performance from you.
You can watch the movie or read the book or listen to the song as many times as you want. You can choose to ignore the tough questions it poses while you laugh, then reconsider it days, weeks or years later when something in your life makes that tough question pertinent for you.
I can never even remember the NAME of the lead singer for Def Leppard -- Joe something, I think -- but I listened to their Hysteria album over and over and had The Feels in part because when the band's drummer lost an arm they didn't replace him. I think it was Joe something -- the lead singer -- who said something like "The music was still in there. It just had to be remapped."
So while songs like Love Bites probably aren't intended to be about something like sticking by your bandmate after he loses an ARM, I felt like there was something special there, something to learn from, something good for my soul because I knew some personal detail about their lives that made me see their music as not just pretty lines that rhymed.
Instead, I saw their work as written and performed by people whose art meant something because of the people it came from and whom I could learn from if I wanted my life to work in spite of -- ironically -- me metaphorically saying all the time that the world asks women to choose which arm they want to have lopped off, their left one or their right one.
In other words, do you want a career OR a personal life? Do you want a career or to be a GOOD mother and wife?
Men don't get asked that. Men get the message that if you want a personal life, you NEED a career to qualify for having a wife and kids. Women get told "Pick one and ONLY one and fuck you if you want both."
Even though I listened to Def Leppard a LOT at one time to try to heal my damaged sexuality, I NEVER had sexual fantasies about the members of the band. That seems really rude to me. To me, it was like a spiritual thing and I don't typically treat people like sex obects, not even famous Beautiful People who have put their sexuality out there to some degree as part of their work.
GLAAD’s Advocate for Change Award has been given twice: In 2019, it was given to Madonna and in 2013 it was given to President Bill Clinton.
The fact that it's ONLY been granted twice and they don't do this every single year means it's a more meaningful award than most. They didn't pick these two people as "The least suckitude of all candidates for THIS year, sadly."
In my youth I was a huge Madonna fan and somewhere along the way I stopped being interested. Her work stopped speaking to me.
It became superficial. It went from "Express yourself" to "Bitch, I'm Madonna." I think she is resting on her laurels, playing the music live that made her big because she has bills to pay and no longer wants to put herself out there. Perhaps the personal price is too high.
Some woman once said that Madonna slept with her and then denied it. Madonna is such a huge advocate for the LGBTQ community that it would not really be shocking if it turned out she was gay or bisexual and hoping to make the world "safer" for people like her while not willing to come out of the closet herself because the world isn't safe enough for her tastes for some reason.
I personally think the strongest statement you can make, the most powerful thing you can do is just be yourself and if you are gay be honest about that. Though at the same time I think you have a right to privacy and aren't OBLIGATED to do "tell all" books merely because your face happens to be plastered all over billboards due to the kind of work you do.
I spent several YEARS trying to suss out how in the hell Jessica Livingston founded a successful business with three men. There was very little info on that aspect of Y Combinator and probably still is.
At the time, I felt like understanding how a woman navigated the "sexual politics" element would have been extremely valuable information for ME but also understood why those kinds of details were not likely to ever be divulged. And maybe the takeaway there is if you happen to find yourself with the right formula for getting shit done, keep your mouth shut.
And maybe not. Maybe all the people keeping their mouths shut are implicitly lying to the world and making it crazier by denying people the truth about critical details like "How does a successful business woman end up like Jessica Livingston instead of like Elizabeth Holmes?"
My favorite movie line is "I'm too truthful to be good." because it resonates with me. The older I get the more strongly I feel my honesty is part of why I remain a big fat nobody, dirt poor, lacking power and money and a real career.
But I don't know how to "fix" that because I would rather be real and genuinely move the needle a tiny amount than SEEM to make a difference but really not while being warped out of shape by the mountain of lies involved in some PR campaign required to force-fit me to some Overton Window and thereby make me "socially acceptable" in the public eye.
I hate this blog. I hate it so very, very, very much.
It always feel like I have both said too much and not enough all at the same time.
This blog exists because the world is full of insane people who desperately need help and effectively have no place to go. So I can write it or let the world continue on its merry way to hell in a handbasket with no hope of fixing it.
But writing it also feels like a fool's errand that also has no hope of fixing anything and -- worse -- comes back to bite me in the ass because a lot of the people who most DESPERATELY want and need answers are Good Christians warped out of shape by their religion who are all too happy to both look up my skirts and STALK ME to do it and then act like the sin is somehow MINE, not theirs.
They are "Good Christians" from judgey families who can't admit they like girls, not boys, or they had an affair or whatever. And they look to me both as someone they think might actually be a good person -- in that I generally try to be kind to people -- and whom they hope will somehow tell them they are okay, the thing they did is understandable and forgiveable and I love them and APPROVE and etc.
I'm not here to tell you that. That's not my goal in life and it's not my job.
I'm much more conservative than most people seem to want to think I am. I got married at nineteen to another nineteen year old, someone I graduated high school with, and he happened to be the second guy I had slept with.
He's the last person I had sex with -- at least "in meat space" -- more than eighteen years ago and I have long avoided talking about having had a "virtual" personal life during those years because it's a private matter, it's not your business, I don't need nor want five million internet strangers deciding I'm an internet HO and will be happy to "put out" virtually for them when that's NOT true.
No, that doesn't mean I have ONLY had sex in meat space with JUST two people and I never know a good way to talk about that either without going into more detail about my life than I am comfortable with doing online and it's not really your business.
I don't typically drink, but I'm not judgey about it if you drink. I learned this from MY PARENTS because dad drank heavily for years and mom was a tee totaller and never gave him a hard time about his drinking.
The extent of my experience with illicit drugs is one toke off of a joint at age 16 under enormous social pressure followed by saying "No thanks. I get HIGHER off of Dr. Pepper and it's LEGAL." when pressured to take a SECOND puff. Plus lots of second hand exposure, sometimes without initially knowing it, which is how I know what MJ smells like and that I'm ALLERGIC.
I don't sleep around casually but if you aren't actually trying to get into my pants in meat space, I generally think how many notches you have on your belt is, in most cases, not my business.
That doesn't mean I APPROVE. Most likely I think you are AN IDIOT taking excessive risks with your health, among other things.
I'm an EXTREMELY conservative person when it comes to ACTUALLY taking my clothes off and getting jiggy with someone or using "substances" etc.
I'm crystal clear that I'm EXTREMELY conservative in part because I have a genetic disorder, so my health is FRAGILE and, thus, sleeping around casually and imbibing drugs and such is MORE DANGEROUS for me than average.
With that knowledge, I also KNOW for a fact that I'm not really in a good position to JUDGE others and what makes sense for them. Maybe drugs and alcohol work FINE for them even though they don't work FINE for ME.
I'm also very knowledgeable about social stuff, so I generally am slow to judge and want a LOT more context than most people. That doesn't mean I APPROVE of everything you do because I'm not running around saying on the public record "You are GOING TO HELL for drinking, drugging, and having slept with more than one person in the decades you have been an adult!"
It means I don't know you well enough to know if I would think that about you OR if I would go "Oh, you drank because you had an unidentified MEDICAL condition you were de facto treating."
It means I spent a lot of years reading everything I could get my hands on to sort my personal crap because I was sexually abused as a child, because I'm a woman in a man's world, etc. and I've drawn some CONCLUSIONS about some things and I think MAYBE me blogging about some of that will HELP some people sort their issues. I think it might be USEFUL INFORMATION for SOME people.
That doesn't make me your BEST FRIEND. That doesn't mean this is TRUE LOVE and I shall totes marry you. If you think anything like that, what I probably am thinking about you and maybe not SAYING is "You belong in a straight jacket and padded room."
I have long seen myself as in the wisdom business and so I have long felt that if my writing is ever going to be "successful" -- make good money, sway people, have real influence, teach people something -- I need to prove that, like Def Leppard, there is something more to me and my writing than pretty words.
What with being a woman and raised from birth to have a private life, not a public life, I have a history of oversharing and it's been compounded by the fact that I am, in fact, talking about a lot of very private aspects of life in hopes of helping people sort their crap. It's been extremely tough trying to sort out how to say something meaningful without being like the girl in some college sex ed class who purportedly asked in class in front of everyone "Yes, but why does semen taste salty?"
This has been compounded by the fact that the world has a lot of crazy people in it just desperately looking for someone to latch onto and what you want be damned. It's a problem that seems to generally be worse for women but it's also possible that what's really worse for women is we get less pay-off for enduring it -- we make less money, etc. -- and so it bothers us more.
The reality is that even men wind up with stalkers. Will Smith had some kind of stalker at one time and not that long ago I saw a headline about Pierce Brosnan trying to get a court order to stop some crazy lady fan from coming to his home and bothering his family.
It's possible men don't get such garbage LESS than women. It's possibly they have simply been groomed from birth to largely ignore it and carry on because they are NOTHING without a serious career and big paycheck and complaining overly much about something like that will undermine their "macho" reputation as a "real man" -- or, as noted above, they complain less because, hey, their work made them wealthy and it's just part of the overall package deal.
I've said this before and maybe I need to just get used to putting some things on repeat: I write a parenting blog in hopes of helping people do a better job of raising future adults even if they didn't have an easy start in life and weren't easy kids to deal with. I write THIS blog in hopes of offering resources to kids like mine who didn't have a parent like me and are trying to sort their crap AFTER things went sideways.
BUT -- and it's a big BUT -- I'm not Christian. This is INSTRUCTION rooted in analysis and study, NOT me personally loving YOU as an individual, much less me trying to be your PERSONAL SAVIOR.
Becoming personally obsessed with me and harassing me and hurting me for being HELPFUL to you is NOT APPROPRIATE nor HEALTHY behavior. Please don't do that, if only for YOUR SAKE. It won't improve your mental health and if it goes far enough could come back to bite you in some fashion.
If it's helpful to you and you value my work, the APPROPRIATE big feels response is to PAY ME for my work. Squee and go "GOSH, GEE GOLLY WHIZ. THANK YOU! Have some MONEY!"
You can do that by supporting my Patreon or leaving me a tip. (If you use PayPal, please leave a note telling me why: "For your blogs"/"For THIS specific blog or blog post in particular." I need that info not just for ME but to fill out my tax forms.)
To the best of my ability, I try to never lie and I'm generally not good at lying and I don't really want to get good at it.
I've talked before on this blog about coming out as "very heteropassing" or "not straight" in part to serve as an advocate for the LGBTQ crowd. But I also have this very deep belief that unnecessarily deceiving people makes the world a fundamentally worse place because it fosters insanity.
It makes it tough for people to figure out how to live their lives if they are looking to you as a role model and they believe X about you and X is not true.
Though the older I get, the harder I try to err on the side of protecting my privacy and have made my peace with the idea that telling The Truth doesn't obligate me to to tell The WHOLE Truth and overshare to the same degree I once did.
It often isn't even good communication. More details is sometimes an exercise in distracting from your point, not clarifying it.
Sadly, no amount of honesty or accuracy prevents other people from running my words through their warped minds and going weird places I never intended to go and this post is intended to TRY to clarify a few things. Billy Joel is such a great artist. I'm sure I never want to meet the man behind the music. It would likely be a huge disappointment.
His work is brilliant and seems very personal and heart-felt and wise but it is his work. It is what he chooses to share of himself for pay, and that doesn't mean I actually know ANYTHING about the man at all as a private person, as an individual.
The world seems to really have trouble with that concept.
It has so much trouble with distinguishing the private person from their work that Janet Jackson was secretly married for years to the man she was OPENLY living with to preserve the sex appeal of her work and the movie Marilyn and Me suggests that Marilyn Monroe had a secret marriage to someone who probably really loved her and was forced by studio executives to not only end it but cover it up so thoroughly the movie reads like a variation on The Titanic movie where an unprovable, fictitious story was attached to a publicly known thing.
People the world over want to imagine they have a PERSONAL and SPECIAL relationship to famous people whose work speaks to them and this is the essence of fandom and it's part of how some people get rich, by selling their work to the many strangers who have never met them yet want to feel they have a special connection to the artist.
Decades ago, people like Marilyn Monroe were SEEN by a LOT of people on the big screen or whatever but likely most of the time had very private lives similar to any other person with a job. Their public image could be curated to a degree that it cannot be today. With 8 billion people on planet earth AND cell phones and internet, it's impossible to live anything resembling a "normal" life and be famous.
And I know I am not just imagining this. I saw a musician talk about how he could do huge sold-out stadium venues and make tons of money and have his music all over the radio and walk down the street in his hometown without security and not be recognized by anyone as a famous musician.
And then MTV came along and the era of adding huge video screens to the stage so people in the back row could see your face in great and glorious detail while you sang and suddenly he couldn't have a normal life anymore. That deal was over. That life was GONE.
I have an ENTIRE website dedicated to my hypothesis that women get groomed from birth to have a PRIVATE role in life as a full-time wife and mom and men get groomed from birth to have a PUBLIC role in life, to have a career which qualifies them for having a full-time wife taking care of all their personal needs from sex to cooking to cleaning and anything else they may need.
I think this trips up men and women equally with regards to the world trying to find other answers, answers that will allow women to have real careers and aspire to other things. I think women very often don't know where to draw that line and men may not know that women don't know and need help and often men wouldn't know themselves how to help women with this issue because men often just don't share themselves honestly with ANYONE, even their wife, and wives accept that because he may have a security clearance or NDA at work and even if he doesn't, people won't hire him if they think he repeats every single thing to his wife.
That's usually not a thing people talk about. It's implicit. It's just understood and it creates this invisible barrier that I increasingly believe is a large factor in the so-called glass ceiling.
It's really hard to sort out where to draw or redraw those lines in part because there often is no clear, bright line between the person and their work. For people like politicians who are in positions of public trust, we routinely want to know if they are trustworthy and trying to sort out if they are a person of good character often means trying to figure out something about their personal life because "Character is what we do when we think no one is watching."
Even in the case of art, good art speaks to us. We value art not merely as superficial and harmless entertainment but also for the life lessons we can learn in a non-threatening fashion, for the ability to talk about hard subjects and so forth in a way that lets the audience decide just how much they want to engage with the tough pieces of it.
It's not like paying a therapist or taking a college class. No one is going to grade you, judge you, expect or demand a certain level of effort or performance from you.
You can watch the movie or read the book or listen to the song as many times as you want. You can choose to ignore the tough questions it poses while you laugh, then reconsider it days, weeks or years later when something in your life makes that tough question pertinent for you.
I can never even remember the NAME of the lead singer for Def Leppard -- Joe something, I think -- but I listened to their Hysteria album over and over and had The Feels in part because when the band's drummer lost an arm they didn't replace him. I think it was Joe something -- the lead singer -- who said something like "The music was still in there. It just had to be remapped."
So while songs like Love Bites probably aren't intended to be about something like sticking by your bandmate after he loses an ARM, I felt like there was something special there, something to learn from, something good for my soul because I knew some personal detail about their lives that made me see their music as not just pretty lines that rhymed.
Instead, I saw their work as written and performed by people whose art meant something because of the people it came from and whom I could learn from if I wanted my life to work in spite of -- ironically -- me metaphorically saying all the time that the world asks women to choose which arm they want to have lopped off, their left one or their right one.
In other words, do you want a career OR a personal life? Do you want a career or to be a GOOD mother and wife?
Men don't get asked that. Men get the message that if you want a personal life, you NEED a career to qualify for having a wife and kids. Women get told "Pick one and ONLY one and fuck you if you want both."
Even though I listened to Def Leppard a LOT at one time to try to heal my damaged sexuality, I NEVER had sexual fantasies about the members of the band. That seems really rude to me. To me, it was like a spiritual thing and I don't typically treat people like sex obects, not even famous Beautiful People who have put their sexuality out there to some degree as part of their work.
GLAAD’s Advocate for Change Award has been given twice: In 2019, it was given to Madonna and in 2013 it was given to President Bill Clinton.
The fact that it's ONLY been granted twice and they don't do this every single year means it's a more meaningful award than most. They didn't pick these two people as "The least suckitude of all candidates for THIS year, sadly."
In my youth I was a huge Madonna fan and somewhere along the way I stopped being interested. Her work stopped speaking to me.
It became superficial. It went from "Express yourself" to "Bitch, I'm Madonna." I think she is resting on her laurels, playing the music live that made her big because she has bills to pay and no longer wants to put herself out there. Perhaps the personal price is too high.
Some woman once said that Madonna slept with her and then denied it. Madonna is such a huge advocate for the LGBTQ community that it would not really be shocking if it turned out she was gay or bisexual and hoping to make the world "safer" for people like her while not willing to come out of the closet herself because the world isn't safe enough for her tastes for some reason.
Natalie was a beautiful woman and famous actress and she hid her age. She was often seen in public with very handsome young men on her arm, so when she told her friend she hadn't had sex with anyone since her own surgery, her friend interjected "But what about all these guys you DATE?"Odds are good a LOT of people, whether in Hollywood or not, are still in the closet. I mean just the data we know tells you that must be true.
Natalie told her those weren't really dates. It was just part of keeping up appearances for the Hollywood scene and, furthermore, most of those young men were gay.
I personally think the strongest statement you can make, the most powerful thing you can do is just be yourself and if you are gay be honest about that. Though at the same time I think you have a right to privacy and aren't OBLIGATED to do "tell all" books merely because your face happens to be plastered all over billboards due to the kind of work you do.
I spent several YEARS trying to suss out how in the hell Jessica Livingston founded a successful business with three men. There was very little info on that aspect of Y Combinator and probably still is.
At the time, I felt like understanding how a woman navigated the "sexual politics" element would have been extremely valuable information for ME but also understood why those kinds of details were not likely to ever be divulged. And maybe the takeaway there is if you happen to find yourself with the right formula for getting shit done, keep your mouth shut.
And maybe not. Maybe all the people keeping their mouths shut are implicitly lying to the world and making it crazier by denying people the truth about critical details like "How does a successful business woman end up like Jessica Livingston instead of like Elizabeth Holmes?"
My favorite movie line is "I'm too truthful to be good." because it resonates with me. The older I get the more strongly I feel my honesty is part of why I remain a big fat nobody, dirt poor, lacking power and money and a real career.
But I don't know how to "fix" that because I would rather be real and genuinely move the needle a tiny amount than SEEM to make a difference but really not while being warped out of shape by the mountain of lies involved in some PR campaign required to force-fit me to some Overton Window and thereby make me "socially acceptable" in the public eye.
I hate this blog. I hate it so very, very, very much.
It always feel like I have both said too much and not enough all at the same time.
This blog exists because the world is full of insane people who desperately need help and effectively have no place to go. So I can write it or let the world continue on its merry way to hell in a handbasket with no hope of fixing it.
But writing it also feels like a fool's errand that also has no hope of fixing anything and -- worse -- comes back to bite me in the ass because a lot of the people who most DESPERATELY want and need answers are Good Christians warped out of shape by their religion who are all too happy to both look up my skirts and STALK ME to do it and then act like the sin is somehow MINE, not theirs.
They are "Good Christians" from judgey families who can't admit they like girls, not boys, or they had an affair or whatever. And they look to me both as someone they think might actually be a good person -- in that I generally try to be kind to people -- and whom they hope will somehow tell them they are okay, the thing they did is understandable and forgiveable and I love them and APPROVE and etc.
I'm not here to tell you that. That's not my goal in life and it's not my job.
I'm much more conservative than most people seem to want to think I am. I got married at nineteen to another nineteen year old, someone I graduated high school with, and he happened to be the second guy I had slept with.
He's the last person I had sex with -- at least "in meat space" -- more than eighteen years ago and I have long avoided talking about having had a "virtual" personal life during those years because it's a private matter, it's not your business, I don't need nor want five million internet strangers deciding I'm an internet HO and will be happy to "put out" virtually for them when that's NOT true.
No, that doesn't mean I have ONLY had sex in meat space with JUST two people and I never know a good way to talk about that either without going into more detail about my life than I am comfortable with doing online and it's not really your business.
I don't typically drink, but I'm not judgey about it if you drink. I learned this from MY PARENTS because dad drank heavily for years and mom was a tee totaller and never gave him a hard time about his drinking.
The extent of my experience with illicit drugs is one toke off of a joint at age 16 under enormous social pressure followed by saying "No thanks. I get HIGHER off of Dr. Pepper and it's LEGAL." when pressured to take a SECOND puff. Plus lots of second hand exposure, sometimes without initially knowing it, which is how I know what MJ smells like and that I'm ALLERGIC.
I don't sleep around casually but if you aren't actually trying to get into my pants in meat space, I generally think how many notches you have on your belt is, in most cases, not my business.
That doesn't mean I APPROVE. Most likely I think you are AN IDIOT taking excessive risks with your health, among other things.
I'm an EXTREMELY conservative person when it comes to ACTUALLY taking my clothes off and getting jiggy with someone or using "substances" etc.
I'm crystal clear that I'm EXTREMELY conservative in part because I have a genetic disorder, so my health is FRAGILE and, thus, sleeping around casually and imbibing drugs and such is MORE DANGEROUS for me than average.
With that knowledge, I also KNOW for a fact that I'm not really in a good position to JUDGE others and what makes sense for them. Maybe drugs and alcohol work FINE for them even though they don't work FINE for ME.
I'm also very knowledgeable about social stuff, so I generally am slow to judge and want a LOT more context than most people. That doesn't mean I APPROVE of everything you do because I'm not running around saying on the public record "You are GOING TO HELL for drinking, drugging, and having slept with more than one person in the decades you have been an adult!"
It means I don't know you well enough to know if I would think that about you OR if I would go "Oh, you drank because you had an unidentified MEDICAL condition you were de facto treating."
It means I spent a lot of years reading everything I could get my hands on to sort my personal crap because I was sexually abused as a child, because I'm a woman in a man's world, etc. and I've drawn some CONCLUSIONS about some things and I think MAYBE me blogging about some of that will HELP some people sort their issues. I think it might be USEFUL INFORMATION for SOME people.
That doesn't make me your BEST FRIEND. That doesn't mean this is TRUE LOVE and I shall totes marry you. If you think anything like that, what I probably am thinking about you and maybe not SAYING is "You belong in a straight jacket and padded room."
I have long seen myself as in the wisdom business and so I have long felt that if my writing is ever going to be "successful" -- make good money, sway people, have real influence, teach people something -- I need to prove that, like Def Leppard, there is something more to me and my writing than pretty words.
What with being a woman and raised from birth to have a private life, not a public life, I have a history of oversharing and it's been compounded by the fact that I am, in fact, talking about a lot of very private aspects of life in hopes of helping people sort their crap. It's been extremely tough trying to sort out how to say something meaningful without being like the girl in some college sex ed class who purportedly asked in class in front of everyone "Yes, but why does semen taste salty?"
This has been compounded by the fact that the world has a lot of crazy people in it just desperately looking for someone to latch onto and what you want be damned. It's a problem that seems to generally be worse for women but it's also possible that what's really worse for women is we get less pay-off for enduring it -- we make less money, etc. -- and so it bothers us more.
The reality is that even men wind up with stalkers. Will Smith had some kind of stalker at one time and not that long ago I saw a headline about Pierce Brosnan trying to get a court order to stop some crazy lady fan from coming to his home and bothering his family.
It's possible men don't get such garbage LESS than women. It's possibly they have simply been groomed from birth to largely ignore it and carry on because they are NOTHING without a serious career and big paycheck and complaining overly much about something like that will undermine their "macho" reputation as a "real man" -- or, as noted above, they complain less because, hey, their work made them wealthy and it's just part of the overall package deal.
I've said this before and maybe I need to just get used to putting some things on repeat: I write a parenting blog in hopes of helping people do a better job of raising future adults even if they didn't have an easy start in life and weren't easy kids to deal with. I write THIS blog in hopes of offering resources to kids like mine who didn't have a parent like me and are trying to sort their crap AFTER things went sideways.
BUT -- and it's a big BUT -- I'm not Christian. This is INSTRUCTION rooted in analysis and study, NOT me personally loving YOU as an individual, much less me trying to be your PERSONAL SAVIOR.
Becoming personally obsessed with me and harassing me and hurting me for being HELPFUL to you is NOT APPROPRIATE nor HEALTHY behavior. Please don't do that, if only for YOUR SAKE. It won't improve your mental health and if it goes far enough could come back to bite you in some fashion.
If it's helpful to you and you value my work, the APPROPRIATE big feels response is to PAY ME for my work. Squee and go "GOSH, GEE GOLLY WHIZ. THANK YOU! Have some MONEY!"
You can do that by supporting my Patreon or leaving me a tip. (If you use PayPal, please leave a note telling me why: "For your blogs"/"For THIS specific blog or blog post in particular." I need that info not just for ME but to fill out my tax forms.)