Engaged.

I may just ramble here for a second to see how people reply because I don't want to specifically talk about my life right now and I've learned to accept the blunt tool aspect that language has and I don't know if that is a fact many people understand explicitly.

There is just no way to apply logic to my behavior or reactions and I'm not sure that doesn't apply to everyone. I'm pretty certain of it in fact. Sometimes I fold entirely under pressure that may not seem very intense from the outside and sometimes I can soldier through objective tragedy. I don't exactly remember what's on this list and I looked at it again because it's meant to be amusing in part:

http://www.cockeyed.com/magic/bad_4.php

But there's more than a few things on there that have happened to me, even in the last year. It's hard to explain how that feels because it's just complicated.

I feel like I deserve a gold fucking star sometimes for just waking up or not crying at a given moment when that's a hard thing to resist. Everyone deals with things they aren't appreciated for that are internally important. Difficulties that are not important enough to mention but would be so greatly appreciated if anyone noticed at all the level of a quiet struggle.

And that seems to be my life. A very slow process of coming to be grateful for anything I have or am afforded and the smallest recognitions of any signal from someone about how hard it can be for me just to not accept failure or any number of undesirable things that would be easy to give in to. This is something that is in large part my fault. But there are a lot of difficult to recognize or understand factors in my life that I deal with every day that I cannot overestate the amount of effort it's been to function at a level where if I fold it's a goddamn surprise to everyone looking at me. And that has forced me to educate myself and accept faults of my own that people who have them can exist easily without recognizing and just generally be open to the fact that I don't often know what the fuck is even happening. But that has given me an empathy that I do want a gold fucking star for one day towards people who no one even wants to look at and people who are easily dismissed for reasons that I've learned to see as incredibly judgemental because I have a taste of how bad life can be in ways that people in the first world have no appreciation for since they've never, for example, had to weigh the benefit of carrying everything you own against its weight and the stress that will create to hold on to objects that are not very basically essential. I have done that.

And I have not given up and when I've tried to I've failed. Just general advice I've learned through experience, personal or by observation, smiling itself can be nearly impossible sometimes so. Or comforting in its ease at a moment. I feel like people in America sprint through life and are surprise how short it is when they accelerated its speed by worrying about duvet covers or taking cold water for granted. Everyone reading this should understand the levels of grace they've been afforded just by having electricity and internet access. Billions of people right now are comfortable being unsure how they will next eat.

I want a gold star sometimes because the very low level of optimism I seem to put off is a lot more than people who I think have none and whatever level of give a fuck I have left is important and probably hard fought.