I’ve never been the greatest at engagement. I’m an introvert, I’ve got ADHD, and I spend most of my time worrying that I’m doing everything wrong. However, I got out of my shell and started chatting with people on Threads, this was after Instagram randomly started bugging out. So of course Threads did too and I got an alert that apparently I was showing signs of being run by a “big group” trying to “artificially make myself bigger”? What changed? I started engaging with others, I started commenting instead of just liking posts. I started engaging and people started responding back on Insta and Threads but much more than I was doing. Instead of my passive behavior, I was active. I stopped just scrolling or liking posts. I don’t mind going past social media posts that I disagree with, but it was when those toxic people came into regular posts and started being horrible. I wasn’t ok with it.

The main thing that changed though was what I was talking about. I was finally being political? I admit, I didn’t use social media to discuss politics previously because that was what Reddit was for.

I’ve gotten tired of the Russian bots on Reddit, so I started to really discuss my opinions and thoughts openly. I should also mention that I got a 21 day ban for “baiting” because I called an obvious fan of “Call of Duty” or one of the other military games, out for being a hypocrite after they denigrated the service of someone else when it was obvious they’d never served and were using terms common to video games. I’m fine with it though it wasn’t fair of me to use video games to call out someone. I was angry, I should have minded my manners and I won’t do it again. That person called a man who served 24 years in the National Guard someone who stole Valor and that angered me. The correct response to someone who served their country, no matter what country, is “Thank you for your service”. I don’t have to agree with them to recognize that they did something extremely hard. It’s ok though, telling the person in question to go back to their video games was “trolling, baiting, flaming”. I don’t regret telling them to back off but I probably shouldn’t have added the swipe about the video game. That was wrong of me. I do publicly apologize for that.

For the record I was not military. I did attempt to enlist, I was turned down because of my medical history. My grandfather and my father served.

So, let’s talk a bit about me, who I am etc. I have a very strong ethical and moral code. That code the very basis of it was to try to do the right thing, and relieve the suffering of people I saw around me but internally I kept trying to “Do no harm”. I failed at the “do no harm” bit because I didn’t have a good definition for what that meant and I didn’t always recognize harm.

My ethical code has changed and grown as I have but at its core it is essentially to treat others the way I would want to be treated and to be Kind. I don’t want nice, I don’t want “better”, I want kindness and I want to see others treated with kindness. My ethical code is empathy and I reject anyone who doesn’t have it.

I have made mistakes that taught me the value of the ethics and morals I have. I learned the hard way because of what has happened to me and mistakes I have made along the way. I learned from watching others hurt people, from being hurt, from hurting others. My ethics are binding to me and I will absolutely stand up for someone else even if it’s hard.

That doesn’t mean I’m always right, I’ve been mistaken but even in those cases, I learned a valuable lesson.

My guiding light is kindness. It’s what everything inside me comes back to. This isn’t to say that I’ve always lived up to it. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been petty, cruel or mean before. It is to say that empathy has taught me that what I did was wrong and that I should do better. That I should be better and that if I ever feel that urge again I should stop. If I see someone being those things I should stop them too, because I would want to be stopped.

You cannot always fix things. You cannot always expect that the person you apologize to will forgive you for the harm you caused but you can do and be better. Empathy teaches you that the right thing to do is to stop yourself and to stand up and stop others.

I accept that I won’t always be right, I won’t always say the right thing and I might hurt someone again. I will, however, apologize when I am wrong and when I hurt someone. I will do better. For those who will inevitably do a deep dive into my past. I will be up front here I didn’t always live up to the person I wanted to be. When I was younger, I was immature, scared, ridiculously confused about life and terrified of making a mistake or being wrong. I say this not to excuse it but to explain it. I made a lot of stupid immature and wrong choices. I said things, and I did things that I regret to this day. I have apologized to the people I could apologize to but I did not apologize to everyone because not everyone is willing to listen to my apology and that is their right. No one should be required to forgive me for the mistakes I made, it doesn’t matter how much I have changed. I accept that it was my actions that led to them not wanting me as part of their life and that I can never change that. Sometimes apologies are not enough. It is absolutely ok for them to make that decision and my younger self deserved it. I learned from that and I have grown from that. I would not be the person I am today without having experienced that.

What I can do is honor them by never making that mistake again. I can be better, I can do better and I absolutely can own my mistakes as being mistakes. I am sorry to those I hurt when I was figuring things out. I really and truly am sorry, but sorry doesn’t fix things and people I hurt didn’t always deserve it. There are some out there who did, and they know who they are.

Things I want to be up front about, so that there are no surprises. I am the type of person who tries to learn things. I absolutely will go down the rabbit hole to find obscure information about subjects because of an inner curiosity and drive to know. I probably know more random facts about things that you’ve never heard of than I care to admit (usually learned when I was supposed to be doing something else).

When I change my mind, I’m not “flip-flopping” and I absolutely reject that moniker when applied to me. I’m not following a trend, people who have known me a long time realize I couldn’t follow a trend even if I wanted to, I’m not good at it. When I change my mind it’s because I have taken the time to study something, I have gone into a deep dive, read more obscure details than I can get into and I can give you the footnotes. When I change my mind, I realize that I was wrong and I do change my mind when I learn more information about things. I am not stagnant, I am absolutely not set in my ways (I can’t even follow the same habits people). When I learn something that proves me wrong, I accept it, move on and save that information to attempt to help others too.

People who blame others for things that happen, people who never admit to making mistakes? They never learn, and they never grow.

People who claim to have all of the answers, or refuse to admit when they’re wrong? They aren’t good people. What defines a person’s character is how they handle their mistakes and whether they are willing to admit they were wrong.

The next point I need to make. I have ADHD, which I tell you as a means to explain and to warn you. The one true reality for ADHD is inconsistency is the consistent pattern. I do not get to control what my brain wants to focus on, nor do I get to control what my “hyperfocus” is. Dopamine decides that for me and that means, I will shift gears and I will do things a little differently. ADHD is a both a blessing and a curse. It has helped me be extremely creative and also extremely dysfunctional. I do my best. It also helped me understand others on a deep level. I know what it feels like to be misunderstood. I know what it feels like to know what people expect but be unable to meet that expectation. I know what real executive dysfunction feels like and to always feel that curse of “If only I could reach my potential”. Constantly chasing a dream that never seems to appear. It made me recognize when someone lacks empathy and I know a bully when I see one.

Right now my ADHD hyperfocus is preventing a Narcissist and his Lackey from ever holding power over the World. My hyperfocus is with communicating precisely why I stopped caring about the irrelevant news pundits, whose unwillingness to check their own biases at the door in favor of “ratings” have pushed me away. My hyperfocus is a broken system that I’ve watched deteriorate all in the name of “profits” and for what? Truth is now filtered through yellow journalists and billionaires filters. I don’t have to agree with everything a journalist says, but they better be able to back up their statements with cold hard facts supplied by people with real degrees vs something that was given to them by a lobbyist. They had better be able to prove that the people who provided those cold hard facts did their work by attempting to disprove their hypothesis and that it withstood that very strong attempt to destroy the hypothesis. If that’s not where those “cold hard facts” come from then it isn’t one. I am tired of watching news media continually attempt to make itself relevant by following “trends” this isn’t high school. Journalists you are literally toying with millions of people’s lives and you care about what someone wore to a press conference?

I care about fairness, if you get into the face of the current President of the USA and literally start shouting inches from his nose, but you will not do that to the 45th? Then you have absolutely lost my respect. You want to “both sides” but the way you treat the candidates both on and off camera speaks to YOUR character and I have been watching. I don’t want you to tell me how to think or how to feel. I do not want you to use manipulative language and I definitely do not want you to distill every single global conflict into a “Cowboy’s vs Indians” TV show. I am absolutely willing to pay for in depth journalism, but I am not willing to subsidize the entire paper to get that 1 journalist with integrity. I cancelled my Washington Post sub. Every time I start to convince myself to get the NYT’s I look at their articles and change my mind. I donate to the Guardian and Mother Jones. I trust AP and Reuters even though I feel both do not do enough to fully explain the conflicts that they cover. I’d love to see a TIMELINE of events including the ability to really look at what events triggered what things when discussing a situation. We have the technology to do that and we still will not do it. I would love it if my ISP would offer me news as part of my bundle package. I would pay the extra for that, but I am no longer interested in supporting propaganda and opinion pieces masquerading as “news”.

I have stayed silent to keep the peace, to “do no harm” but the reality is my silence has done harm. So I am speaking up. My actions have shown that I will do the right thing because I cannot live with myself otherwise. Even when pressured, I will do the right thing. So I’m speaking up because it’s the right thing.

What I want to see in this world and how I want that world to be for my kids and for my future grandkids. So let me be concise.

If you think it’s “normal” to obsess over what other peoples kids are reading, you are weird and I don’t want to interact with you. You are not the arbiter of what someone else’s kids read. My grandmother was a Librarian, she told me about the FBI signs they had in libraries back in the day. If the sign was gone it was there to alert everyone there that interference was happening.

If you think it’s “normal” to insist that your opinion is more important than the opinion of a woman and her doctor, then I do not want to interact with you. This is a big red line. You do not know what someone else is dealing with and if you think that your opinion is more important than the people who actually know what is going on, then you are not someone I want in my life. Are we clear?

If you think it’s “normal” to tell someone else who to love. It just isn’t. You do not get a say in who someone else loves and if you can’t understand that simple fundamental point then I cannot help you and I do not want to interact with you.

If you do not know what intersex is and you insist that you are the arbiter of gender? You are not normal. That term has been around for centuries we used to have them in freak shows. Parents have been “choosing” the gender of their children for centuries if they had both genders or were intersex and now you’re acting like it’s a new thing? We called them hermaphrodites back then before we realized that it was much more complicated than that.

If you mock disabled people, or neurodivergent people, I do not want you near me and I mean this. Anyone who mocks people for something they didn’t have a choice in, I want nothing to do with you and I will not shed a tear if something bad happens to you. There is a limit to my empathy, I have zero for those who do not care about the disabled and the neurodivergent people. This is a hard red flag line.

It is not normal to tell someone who is biracial to “choose one”. They are both, it’s not hard to understand that. I can be Irish, Finnish, Scottish, German and Dutch all at the same time and I don’t have to “decide” which one of the many different heritages I possess just to please some random person and neither should anyone else.

Now to my final point, and do forgive me for length.

I usually try not to get into personal topics because they’re personal, but when I watch grown adults throwing public temper tantrums to “Own” the lib. I will no longer be silent. These childish adults have no manners and are the people that in public, I would quietly walk away from to keep the peace.

Now they’re bringing it to text messages, emails, etc.. Enough is enough.

I will absolutely block you, I will remove you from my life. I get to decide who I accept into my life and I am done being told that I should treat adult temper tantrums with “respect” because their feelings are hurt.

The same adults who made disparaging and rude comments while I was teaching my Autistic child how to control a melt-down and what to do in situations that they could not control. The same adults who called me a “snowflake” or ranted at me about “participation trophies”. I never got a say in the trophies, and I just wanted decorum and manners to remain a thing. Since that seems to be something these adults cannot grasp, let me break it down for you.

I am under no obligation to listen to an adult throw a very public tantrum nor am I under any obligation to pretend that it’s anything more than a tantrum. I am tired of sitting back and pretending that it’s ok. I have empathy for neurodivergent people having a melt-down because their emotions caught them off guard. If that is what is happening, I will be a lot more understanding. I do not have any empathy for those who deliberately decide that other people’s business is their business. Those who wander into discussions that do not concern them or decide that it’s their place to insult someone in public because of how they look, who they are, or who they love. I will not allow that in my life and I will absolutely refuse to continue to speak to, interact with etc anyone who does that.

Republicans and the Right Wing have broken the social contract of “Mind your OWN DAMN BUSINESS” and it’s past time they are reminded that they forgot to mind their manners. If you are from that group, I need you to understand, if your obsession with others is more important than what’s going on in your own life?

That is a YOU problem. Do not make it mine. I am fine with live and let live, YOU made it my business when you broke the social contract and started insisting that your ideas were “majority” and that I should just go along with it or else. You made it my business when you decided to insert your personal opinions into the lives of everyone around you. It is now my business what you are reading and what your children are reading (I don’t want it to be my business but since you chose to make it your business it is now mine). It is now my business who you love, what you do in your free time, what beliefs you hold and who you associate with. Why? You decided it was your business and thus made it mine.

For those who think I’m being “political” let me set it to a finer point, this wouldn’t be political had the “right” in nearly every single country not made it so. It was personal and it was absolutely no one’s business. I do not want to be friends or have any relationships with people who do not understand that. I do not want to be friends with people who want to control others personal lives.

Seeing as I’m not a complete weirdo obsessed with other people’s daily lives nor do I really want to do any of the things I mentioned above. I’m going to be blunt, I will do what I have been doing quietly all along, I will remove from my life people who do those things.

For those who will argue that I’m being unfair or living in a bubble, let me remind you very carefully. If you were doing ANY of this in a public space, I would absolutely avert my gaze, try to get by or away from you as quickly as possible and then make the concerted effort to avoid you permanently offline too.

It is not living in a bubble to insist that adults don’t throw tantrums in public spaces and that if they do throw that very public tantrum that they be willing to accept the consequences.

If you want to have a public tantrum, do not complain about the repercussions of your tantrum.

I have had millions of silent tantrums in the confines of my own home. In fact, most of you probably have no idea what I really think about politics because for years I’ve been mild and quiet about it.

I’m done being quiet. If you do not like that I’m no longer willing to be silent, I need you to understand this deeply, I no longer care. I am no longer willing to keep the peace because there are some things that are more important than that and I will no longer be silent.

I’ve always tried to do the right thing, I’ve done the right thing when it mattered most and I always voted my conscience without saying a damn word.

I have a backbone of steel and I’m tired of trying to play nice.