;[ where is normal ];

Goya's The Dog

For the last 2.5 years, I have been in therapy for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the main, unstated, point of which seems to have been to get me back to "normal" — normal responses to normal situations. Not to fear everything all the time.

When you're mentally ill, what that really means is your brain is maladjusted to a societally agreed-upon normal. What's the opposite of maladjusted? I, through therapy, was trying to make my brain... good-adjusted.

The problem is that things are no longer normal for me, anyone. There's no center to adjust to.

Scary.

Maybe this can be a freeing feeling, though—stop chasing the fleetingness of a normal that maybe never existed.

There was no normal before this either, right? People were still dying, duh. Capitalism still sucked, duh. Everything is just dying and sucking more now.

At first, people thought this would last a few weeks. Now we know it will last a few months. After that, we may or may not have an economy worse than at any point in the last 100 years. No one's life will be ~normal~ for a long time. This will undoubtedly suck. Great Depressions cause depression, suicide. It's facts. Because of that, I am not an accelerationist. We don't need to wait for the world to get worse to make it better. We should not have to go through this. Trauma is not good.

But we are going through it, and we will be going through it for a while. Thus I propose that because of all the pain and suffering we are about to endure, we don't make ourselves endure more of it by spending all our energy and money and hope returning to our terrible past.

Onward, toward the weird future.