Batang Hamog level unlocked! But kidding aside, I wasn’t expecting that this will be the way how I will exit the the tear-drop shape island of Siargao (Not permanently). Everyone was caught off-guard and by surprise when #typhoonodette hit the entire island so bad. It literally turned the surfing paradise into a sort of complete wasteland in less than five hours on that fateful day of the 16th of December 2021 even my own home was not spared. This was me 3 days after typhoon Odette to pick up my transportation which I left uphill of Tawin tawin where we evacuated since majority of the roads and streets were blocked by fallen branches and uprooted trees after the storm. It took me six days of no electricity, no network, no water from the tap but to fetch water from the deep well to take a bath, no proper sleep, six days of cigarette and water diet since I literally don’t have the appetite to eat proper food though that there is really something proper to eat to finally decide that it’s time for me to go back to Makati temporarily. It was an amazing, nurturing and nourishing almost a year of experience with you Siargao. I am not bidding farewell nor abandoning you. I will comeback once I am mentally and emotionally recovered. SALAMAT KARAJAW, Siargao!
Ps. Thank you to all of my friends whom I consider my family in the island who supported me emotionally, physically, and mentally during the time that I was a complete disaster post-typhoon. @iambobbiethegreat (Mindy and Mother) @xiannemische @gui_spain @snarkynippy @the.lone.lioness Ron @jpearlieeee
For those who want to extend their help to Siargao in order for our home island to recover, follow @tindogsiargao to see ways and means to help the island. . . . . . . #siargao #siargaoisland #supertyphoon #survivor #resilience #ashtanga #ashtangi #riseup #recover #helpsiargao #pinoygram #grammerph #igersmanila #yogi #wewillrise #strength #help #gratitude #nourish #trauma #thankful #grateful #iamalive #tindogsiargao #philippines #fateful #typhoon #letushelp #surfingparadise (at Tawin Tawin Siargao Island) https://www.instagram.com/p/CYL-HrJvUPt/?utm_medium=tumblr
“Learning to follow one’s intuitions doggedly without killing them with prejudgment; to hold at bay catastrophizing projections about reception; to have the fortitude to continue on in the face of indifference, discouragement, or intense criticism; to access or sustain the ambition to try things considered unwise, impossible, taboo, or out of step with one’s times; to ‘stand up for your work! Open it up! Don’t shut it down, man!–all of these things may overlap at times with the aggressive, contaminated language of freedom and rights. But that doesn’t mean they can or should reduce to them. For they are also hard-won habits of artistic devotion that can take years to cultivate, without which a lifelong commitment to art becomes significantly less possible.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Has it really come to this? That mental health and personal resilience, and notendorsing imaginary helplessness, “oppression,” and victimhood, particularly among the most privileged, most entitled people in the safest, freest, most prosperous countries in the world - and worst of all, actually saying, *gasp*, the truth - are now “Republican” qualities?
If hearing the truth triggers or offends you, the problem is you, not the truth.
“If your personal beliefs deny what’s objectively true about the world, then they’re more accurately called personal delusions.”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”
–- Carl Sagan
“If you are emotionally attached to your tribe, religion or political leaning to the poi that truth and justice become secondary considerations, your education is useless. Your exposure is useless. If you cannot reason beyond petty sentiments, you are a liability to mankind.“
– Dr. Chuba Okadigbo
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”
– George Orwell
If I don’t tiptoe around the delicate feelings of the traditionally religious, why would I tiptoe around yours? You’re not on the side you think you are.
“Faith triumphs over facts.”
– Church sign.
“I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth. The truth is not uplifting; it destroys. I could tell most of the secretaries in the church office building that they are ugly and fat. That would be the truth, but it would hurt and destroy them. Historians should tell only that part of the truth that is inspiring and uplifting.’
–Elder Boyd K. Packer, Mormon Elder.
Thank you for proving the point of the meme. And reinforcing why I regard myself as politically homeless.
And maybe take the opportunity to look at a world globe some time.
What if people are emotionally sensitive because they’re overtaxed?
We’re fed a lot more emotional information than we’re practically prepared to process well.
Oversensitivity might result. Like exhaustion from overstimulation.
In a way, you’re correct. Someone who is overweight, has poor fitness, etc will be “over-taxed” simply walking up a flight of stairs. The problem isn’t the stairs, it’s the physical fitness of the person.
The same is true of emotional resilience.
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and describes the phenomenon.
According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided. A person who is trapped in an elevator during a power outage may panic and think she is going to die. That frightening experience can change neural connections in her amygdala, leading to an elevator phobia. If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you should help her avoid elevators.
But if you want to help her return to normalcy, you should take your cues from Ivan Pavlov and guide her through a process known as exposure therapy. You might start by asking the woman to merely look at an elevator from a distance—standing in a building lobby, perhaps—until her apprehension begins to subside. If nothing bad happens while she’s standing in the lobby—if the fear is not “reinforced”—then she will begin to learn a new association: elevators are not dangerous. (This reduction in fear during exposure is called habituation.) Then, on subsequent days, you might ask her to get closer, and on later days to push the call button, and eventually to step in and go up one floor. This is how the amygdala can get rewired again to associate a previously feared situation with safety or normalcy.
There is no resilience to challenge or to hearing things that are true that are uncomfortable. We have an entire culture of “micro-aggressions” and “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” built up around validating and reinforcing the fragility of people, particularly college-age. In a way their parents did not. Students are actively protesting against free speech, while their grandparents protested forit.
Which is to say that they don’t understand to point of freedom of speech at all.
We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real. Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate of emotional distress reported by students themselves is also high, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American College Health Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had “felt overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five years earlier. Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them. The question is whether some of those changes might be doing more harm than good.
Greg Lukianoff, co-author of the Coddling article and subsequent book, runs FIRE - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and he has described it like a switch that was suddenly turned on in the 2013-2014 timeframe where everything suddenly changed, where the nature of the cases and complaints they dealt with changed, and students were suddenly describing things they didn’t like in terms of “harm” or “danger” and demanding speech codes, safe spaces, and other protections from reality.
Christina Hoff Sommers talks about a lecture she gave where fainting-couch feminists fled to a “safe space” with bubbles and coloring books, rather than engaging with her in an intellectual discussion. This is completely new, bizarre behavior compared to the prior decades she’s spend lecturing and presenting.
Haidt and Lukianoff argue that these people been protected from danger - don’t go out into the world on your own, stranger danger!, etc - which makes it more difficult to build resilience (Seerut Chawla likens it to a muscle). Because in order to learn to walk, you have to fall over.
Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old. In the hours after school, kids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But “free range” childhood became less common in the 1980s. The surge in crime from the ’60s through the early ’90s made Baby Boomer parents more protective than their own parents had been. Stories of abducted children appeared more frequently in the news, and in 1984, images of them began showing up on milk cartons. In response, many parents pulled in the reins and worked harder to keep their children safe.
The flight to safety also happened at school. Dangerous play structures were removed from playgrounds; peanut butter was banned from student lunches. After the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado, many schools cracked down on bullying, implementing “zero tolerance” policies. In a variety of ways, children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.
And that they’ve also been taught the “three great untruths”:
Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
Untruth of Us vs Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
These are three of the exact cognitive biases that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is intended to help you un-learn. Specifically because they’re unhealthy. But these are the modern-day “virtues.”
So, yes, they may well be “over-taxed” but not for the reasons you’re suggesting. And it can hardly be blamed on simply saying things that are true, much less an excuse for denying them or claiming they cause “harm” or “hurt.”
Instead it can be blamed on their emotional resilience, the weakness of their emotional “muscle.”
Think of resilience like a muscle. It’s *meant* to be used.
If instead of using & strengthening your muscles you were very carefully carried around all the time- they will atrophy.
The good news is: like your muscles, resilience can be developed.
The idea that we should change the world to accommodate those with low emotional stamina is like saying we should flatten out San Francisco in order to accommodate those whose walking muscles have atrophied. It’s unreasonable and unrealistic, and functions as little more than a plausible deniability excuse. It means it’s always the world’s fault, and never the responsibility of the individual. “It’s the world’s fault I can’t walk around San Francisco, not my fault for not exercising.”
Suggesting that we should protect people from ideas they find uncomfortable or offensive, especially true ones, is the same as suggesting that they remain mentally unhealthy and incapacitated. That they’re correct to feel that helpless and frightened.
The world is a safer place now, particularly in first world countries, than it has ever been. Violent crime is down, standard of living is up, poverty has never been lower. And yet, everything, even this meme, is a drama. And no, it’s not simply drama and “emotional information” being fed. It’s being created by the same people.
And, my point remains. None of my readers expect me to tiptoe around the fragile feelings of believers, to back away from telling them the truth just because they find it uncomfortable or offensive. They cheer me when I don’t.
Why would anyone expect the opposite when it comes to the fragile feelings of others in non-religious matters, simply because they find it uncomfortable or offensive to be told the truth?
Is it just the public spectacle of “the people I don’t like”?
Why would anyone want to read someone who was so lacking in integrity that they’d be that inconsistent and hypocritical? Don’t you already have CNN and Fox News for that?
Carte Noire à Claire Obscure feat. La Toile d’Alma
It was a pleasure to share my earliest video works with you last weekend. A lot has happened since this shy yet ambitious beginning. Many lessons learned, they confirm my intentions, bring nuances to them and a hint of wisdom, at least I hope.
Since I moved to Montreal, I unfortunately dedicate less time to video but this practice is here to stay in my artivist arsenal. Its vocabulary comes almost organically to me since I have spent a couple of decades in front of the small screen, in movie theatres and today online.
The desire and urgency of documenting is still here, yet it is a much more reflective work than it used to be. This year, I intend to design a multidisciplinary artistic grammar and perfect it. A practice that will fulfill my esthetical expectations as well as my political worldview. I plan to keep working on its hybridation towards a shape that will bring meaning and honor to my vision.
Beaucoup de chemin parcouru depuis ces débuts timides et pourtant ambitieux. Les leçons de vie apprises, tantôt douces, tantôt dures, ne font que confirmer mes intentions, elles y apportent des nuances, et je l’espère un peu de sagesse.
Je consacre bien moins de temps au travail vidéo depuis mon arrivée à Montréal, mais cette pratique dans mon arsenal d’artiviste dans la mesure ou son vocabulaire me vient de façon assez organique, ce qui est du aux décennies passées devant le petit écran, dans les salles noires, et aujourd’hui en ligne.
Le désir et l’urgence de documenter m’accompagnent toujours, et cette année, je souhaite développer une grammaire artistique multidisciplinaire à mon image, la perfectionner. Une pratique qui remplira mes exigences aussi bien techniques qu’esthétiques.
La formation en autodidacte occupe une place prépondérante dans mon parcours, en particulier pour les arts numériques. J’ai aujourd’hui le privilège de pouvoir me repencher sur des aspects plus plastiques de ma pratique et de travailler à son hybridation progressive vers une forme qui fait sens et honneur à ma vision.
Je remercie toutes les personnes qui se sont déplacées pour venir m’écouter et me rencontrer, et toutes celles qui me soutiennent de près comme de loin. Merci à ma mère sans qui je n’aurais pas osé faire ce premier court, et à mes sista/o dont le courage et la beauté d’âme m’ont commandé de les capturer en vidéo.
Enfin, merci à l’équipe de l’Euguélionne, mes suricates bibliophiles préféré.e.s Québec!
These past few weeks have reminded me of the need to stay resilient, to find the things that restore my spirit so that I can handle the anxiety of this current crisis without being overwhelmed. This has been challenging, as OVID-19 continues to escalate here in Ontario, and as I am an avid news reader and have been inundating myself with information. I am learning to control checking The…
Content warnings: discussion of trauma and violence (sexual and not), mentions of substance abuse and suicidality and self-harm, all in the context of talking about a work of fiction
Between 2008 and 2011 I wrote the longest piece of writing (fiction or non-fiction) I’ve ever produced–a 133,472 word, 251 page (single-spaced) vampire novel. I poured most of my creative energy into it for 3 years and then just hid it away in my hard drive. I returned to it recently, when I mentioned in a conversation to a friend and suddenly became intensely curious whether it held up or not. For the terminally curious, I liveblogged my reread, but this is not really a post about the vampire novel I wrote (thank goodness–no one wants to read about that). Instead, it’s a post about resilience, how the vampire novel I wrote helped me process a lot of the things going on in my life, and the extent to which I can gauge how much I have grown and changed by looking back on it.
