• 7 Posts
  • 306 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: May 18th, 2024
  • VerilyFemme@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•Are we truly prisoners of our upbringing?
    5·
    17 days ago

    It depends on how you define prisoner.

    For some reason, I’ve been thinking about that stupid-ass Kamala Harris quote recently.

    “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”

    Fuck, she annoys me. But that’s honestly pretty astute. I believe we are inseparable from our upbringing as it gave us the lens through which we view the world. Even when you go against the grain, you have to draw from your experiences to know what not to do.

    So, is one a prisoner? Only so much as one’s experience is a prisoner of oneself. It’s a give and take. Everyone comes into this world unable to meaningfully impress upon it, and so we are formed by those initial experiences that we cannot choose or define. Those experiences inform our actions which inform our future experiences and so on and so forth.

    At the end of the day, I think we’re just truly reactionary beings. I believe we’ve just been reacting to the experience of the universe since we popped up in it. I’ve yet to see a single human creation that wasn’t a reaction to a condition or behavior.

    Mother Necessity, some call it. But I think we can see in other sentient creatures the experience, act, experience pattern as well. We’re just fully sapient so we get to struggle with concepts such as fate.

  • VerilyFemme@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Anyone have any crazy stories to share from Mental Health facilities?
    10·
    25 days ago

    Yeah, I was new in the common area and struck up a conversation with this guy, and I asked him what his tattoos meant.

    He said they were mafia tattoos. Now, I didn’t necessarily believe him because he was just this big, ginger, teddy bear-looking white dude. But, he went into a little detail and told me he was affiliated with multiple syndicates. He could have been messing with me, and I’m also aware that familes don’t really play nice with each other, so again I took this with a grain of salt. But, he told me his Capo was coming to meet him later so I figured I’d see then.

    There was this black woman (race is relevant to this story because race is usually relevant to mafias and the areas in which they operate) at the psych ward that was a little loopy. She would constantly pester the nurses to use the phone, and about every hour she would get access to it. She would call the same 3 people and say the same 5 things over and over again, about how she shouldn’t be in there and all that. The people she was calling would try to explain, she wouldn’t get it, rinse and repeat. Heartbreaking situation, but my main point is that I don’t think she was all there.

    Well, visitation time comes around. This 30-something white guy is visited by a sharply-dressed black man in his 80s. They sat in the corner, speaking quietly for about an hour. During their conversation, the woman I mentioned earlier walked into the common area and saw the elderly gentleman. She stopped dead in her tracks, eyes wide open and mouth agape; she slowly raised her arm to point at him and said, in an ominous tone, “I know that man.” The younger fellow replied quickly, “I’ve been knowin’ him for years, love,” and she just walked away. That pretty much confirmed it for me, and I do believe he was mafia-affiliated to this day.

    Later that night, I was sitting with the big teddy bear fellow in the common area. I was flipping through the channels and saw that Comedy Central was about to air 50 First Dates, the romcom with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore where she plays an amnesiac. Offhandedly, I commented that I had never seen it. He immediately rose up alert in his seat. “You’ve never seen 50 First Dates? That’s one of the best movies of all time. Honestly, I’d say Adam Sandler is the most underrated actor working today. You need to stay up and watch it.”

    You’re damn right I did, too.