D:

I got fixed a couple months ago. Best decision ever.

For nearly 40 years, I’ve been told the horrors of climate change. For nearly 40 years, I’ve watched climate change unravel. And now at nearly 40 years on this planet, I’ve reached a point where I am more concerned about immediate human activity affecting my life rather than the breakdown and collapse of our planet’s environment.

At no point in my life has there ever been a desire to bring a new life into this horrifying existence.

Now if only those weird and miserable old men would stop calling me selfish for not having children. Their obsession with my genitals makes me uncomfortable.

I hate flirting. I just don’t understand it. It’s this weird social dance that no one explains but expects people to understand. It all feels hypocritical that comes with unreasonable expectations.

The biggest source of frustration for me comes from the fact that I have to act in a way that says I am interested while not saying I am interested. That just does not work for me.

I don’t flirt. I don’t even try. I don’t want to be with someone flirty because from my past experiences, flirty people are also not straight forward about other parts of their true selves.

Flirty people also misinterpret a lot of my actions as a result of me not understanding flirting as well. Many flirty people from my experiences have assumed I am flirting. I was just being nice. I was treating them like a person. Just like I treat family like people. And friends like people. And strangers like people.

As a not flirty person, the number of times people have pushed me up against a wall and kissed me, or just jump to kissing me has been way more than I ever expected out of life. Each time has been equally confusing. I wasn’t flirting. I was just treating them how I wanted to be treated.

I have no advice to give but I have some thoughts to share from my life experiences. People like being treated like people. People who make mistakes. People who have their own thoughts and feelings. People who are themselves. I’ve made more genuinely close connections with people, intimate or not, by just treating people as people. And it’s really something as simple as that. Also having a genuine smile helps quite a bit too. When I smile because I’m enjoying the moment, I notice that it draws people towards me. It’s a type of energy that draws people in and it makes me feel even better about myself too.

I’ve noticed personally just how different my mind works when I am constantly presented with data for my actions. Even though these random data points have no real affect on my life, I’m still drawn to having those numbers be bigger than before. From the votes I receive from a social media comment to the reactions from a meme posted in a discord server, all I want is more attention through a click of a button from someone else’s screen.

I hate it. It feels like my value is placed into a number. For me, I prefer my value to come from how I treat other people. I feel a far greater sense of self when I am able to put my time and effort into helping other people. I get to learn the inner workings of someone else and teach them to empower themselves. It feels rewarding when later on those people I helped express their gratitute and trust in me. That is far more rewarding compared to the quick hit from any brain chemistry when looking at a bunch of data points or a bunch of money.

Unfortunately, I can’t make money this way. Not in the way I want to learn, teach and empower other people. I’m terrified of going into a career that will destroy my innate desire to help others. I know it’ll wreck me in the process. Again.

Capitalism destroys everything it touches by sucking all the life, creativity and humanity out of it until there’s a empty shell left behind. An empty shell that looks like every other empty shell. All those empty shells can be counted, given a value and sold. Reducing us and the human experience to yet another data point.

I truly hope more people come to understand that these data points don’t have to put us in a competitions with each other. That our value as people can come from places that don’t have/need to be from a number value.

One day, our planet will die. One day the last historian will die and all that data and preserved knowledge will sit and decay. It’s human knowledge and it’s meaning has more value to humans than any other living creature on our planet.

Personally, I’d rather live a life where my actions are responsible for the wellbeing of myself, my community and the land under my feet. It doesn’t matter to me anymore if my value can’t be reduced to a number.