FAFO...

I've talked before about how I believe as we age we distill our personalities down more and more into the pure essence of ourselves. Some people get meaner, some people get nicer. It's just a shedding of the things that don't fit until you get down to the pure you. 

Looking at the progression of posts on my on this day feed on Facebook I told Brent I seem to be distilling down to a little more of what I was like in high school, a little less of what I was like in my 30s and 40s. He disagreed, to a point, he said I was still nowhere near high school. Bad Denise is not running the show.

He's right, she's not. But she's also not been relegated back to the corner of my head where she could just give snarky commentary for amusement purposes only. There are times she gets to crack her knuckles, smile gleefully, and take center stage.

But not always, she doesn't have free reign.

I think my distillation is going to be pure fuck around and find out. 

Who you get is completely determined by who you give me. 

I have no patience left for ignorance, but I don't have the need (like when I was younger) to come at you constantly and battle it out. If you leave me alone, and leave mine alone, I will ignore your ignorance. I will still think you're ignorant, but I won't spend a lot of energy trying to persuade you not to be. I'll put out my beliefs but I don't give a fuck if you agree with me as long as you don't have a position of power over others.

I also will be supportive and solid for those that I feel need it. I don't like the word deserve, because I think it's a need test that certain people and political parties use to justify not helping when they can. They don't deserve help. Who are you to determine who is deserving and who isn't? So I go by need. And more specifically who I feel needs my help specifically. I mean there is a lot of need out there in the world and I cannot even begin to touch it all, but I can help here and there very specifically. 

I'm a happy person at my core. I think in a way I've reclaimed a lot of the happiness I was struggling with for a few years. Giving up the idea that everyone would be decent if they just had the facts helped. I know that seems counterintuitive right? That really grasping that some people are assholes at their center and there is no changing that could make it easier? But it's true. Helped my mental health a lot. 

It's not my job to fix everyone. There are people out there that don't realize they are broken. They have surrounding themselves with others who feel the same way, think the same things, hate the same people, reject the same facts and they are fine with it all. I am not going to change their mind. It doesn't matter how persuasive I am. How passionate I am. How factually backed I am. It's not going to change and continually being disappointed in them is a waste of my time. 

I saw a meditation post the other day that was "let them." People are going to be, do, say whatever. Let them. Stop fighting against it. Brent and I phrase it assholes gonna asshole, but same thing. 

I'm not going to change the current republican party into a caring body who stops targeting the minority group of the moment so they can keep their base angry and not paying attention to the really horrific OTHER shit they are doing. I can't. I can't convince their base that trans people aren't causing any of their problems. But what I can do it talk to other people about voting. About keeping the pressure up to make sure they don't gerrymander us all out of the system. To stop letting them win by setting talking points. 

It's not going to stop them from being horrible people, but maybe it will stop us from having to live under Christian Nationalism. 

Maybe a difference without a distinction in some ways, but it helps me to think about it that way. I'm not fighting them. I don't fucking care about them. If they want to come fight with me, well I will, but I'm not going to seek them out. I don't care about them enough. But I will fight against them winning. I will keep trying to push back against what they are doing. It's not fighting them, but it's fighting against what they want.

That I do care about. 

Fuck around and find out seems to work. You are kind and decent to me and to mine and to others around you, I will be lovely and generous and giving to you. If we disagree and you mind your business I will mind mine. As soon as you think you should dictate other people's lives due to your own narrow-minded, fact free existence, well, then I don't leave you alone. 

Mostly I spend a lot of time smiling at people. And you get to choose which smile you get.