My birthday had come. It was the end of June and I was not looking
forward to it. I would be turning 30 and I hated the idea of being at
the stereotypical age where you are no longer “young” and are expected
to become a stereotypical “grown-up” overnight more or less. Given what
life’s expectations in society were, even in a clearly different time
for millennials, I was expected to be living independently and have a
full-time job and the whole shebang at this point. And if I didn’t,
there must be something wrong with me or I’m “spoiled” or “using my past
life as an excuse”.
But this is when I had a great idea, even though it was based on very
infuriating and scary circumstances. I was not going to celebrate my
birthday. Instead, I was going to attend a protest in the Boston Common
in response to child immigrants on the Mexican border being put in cages
and being separated from their families. That among other forms of
anti-immigration, bigotry and torture all summoned by Donald Fucking
Trump. So I went with my mother and a bunch people of our local church
and we marched through the Boston Commons with a large banner welcoming
immigrant families.
While all of this was going on, I was constantly checking my phone.
Not just to take pictures and videos of the march and parts of the two
rallies, but to see how a brand new blog post was holding up, on
somebody else’s blog that is. And I will very much admit. Her blog was
and probably still very much is, a lot more popular than mine. But
that’s okay. She was one of the very first people I connected with on
twitter from the Mental Health Community. And yes, if you read the
previous chapter of this series I posted yesterday, I am referring to
the advocate/blogger with Fibromialgia. She had a
tweet a few weeks prior asking if anyone was interested in writing a
story about why they have PTSD, submit it to her via DM and then she
will post it on her blog in a PTSD series, all written by different
people who know her on twitter and..you guessed it..suffer from PTSD.
This was the day where she would post my story about being restrained
and held down to the ground constantly in my old junior high era schools
after being taken away from public school because Columbine happened
and I had nothing to do with that. But I digress. It was performing
fairly well as 8 or so people had “liked” it and this was on a WordPress
account so it was a lot more interactive than the Blogspot account I
was still primarily using. I was starting to consider using WordPress
instead so then I could follow all of the bloggers on twitter I know and
then share each others posts as well. Speaking of a blogging community,
there was someone who I had recently followed to which she followed
back and wanted to connect with me over a new website she had coming up
related to mental health chatting, social media and blogging. I was
thrilled to help her make this happen and partner up. So when she DM’d
me about the opportunity to help promote this new site and give her tips
on what the best and most effective ways to do it are, by then I had
some good answers. I was only on twitter with my new account for 2
months so far but while 2018 was half over, I felt like that year
officially began when I started this blog and my numbness from
depression evaporated. You compare this to all of 2017 and the first
couple months of 2018, you get an entirely different world seen through
my eyes which are finally NOT covered by a blindfold most of the time.
Having said all of that, this was STILL only the beginning…(to be cont’d)
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