This is an old text, and while the sentiment remains, the text contains one old-fashioned ignorant bit about gender dysphoria that I kind of roll eyes at. I did feel like I was born with the wrong gender during my early twenties, but that, I suppose, evened out in the end. Anyway. Old text, at least one deprecated idea that barely connects with the theme.

One of the least-advertised aspects of depression and general dysphoria is the way affected attempt to identify and address "false causes" for their distress. That is, once it dawns on you that you're practically constantly pained, you start to hunt for "WHY?" - a concrete cause, potentially fixable and hence in turn ending the malaise. It's easy to get fixated. Maybe you falsely target your gender or weight, virginity, life partner, LIFE in general, children, lack thereof, job, no job, sex you're (convinced you're) having less than necessary or just your plain visage. So you blaze off with a trail of smouldering bridges and the false causes of your past lives charting your journey of scant discovery.

Do you get your happiness in the end? Well, someone obviously does - or at least the things coincide once in a blue moon, to mark some correlation although not causality. I find myself absolutely showered with these GREAT successes in the media and fiction, where 'winners' parade all smiles with stories of losing exorbitant amounts of fat, virginities, inherent social shyness, their penis, the ol' ball-and-chain and the vast responsibilities of their old life and (though it sounds absurd) they're absolutely cured!

I'm particularly disturbed by the implied dogma of the western world that no matter what mental scars, psychological problems or other epic ailments of the 21st century, LOVE'll cure them all. Guess when you're a primate and only come equipped with genital obsession, every problem begins to look like a moist, pink cunt. I imagine this method of approach must be one of the very reasons so many relationships crash and burn, leaving ever more devastation in the wake as the immeasurable damage dealt by people to people running through failing relationships piles up and escalates. Still, you enter yet another trial already lost, equipped with a headful of crackling circuit wiring and dreams of This One finally healing your soul and justifying all.

I'm sorry, but it isn't like that. Devastated people that feel so bad should have NOTHING to do with romantic relationships prior to getting their worst problems fixed. Seriously. I imagine the nonsensical "you cannot love anyone else if you cannot love yourself" probably attempts to convey the very same thing (badly). You never hear this in a smart way. And commercial broadcasting has a predilection for the probabilistically unlikely: the aforementioned stories are either make-believe or unsupervised to verify whether the life actually improved in the long run. Result: "true stories" are often anomalous exceptions, because plain facts and usual occurrences just aren't very media-sexy. And besides, "nobody wants to hear the losing party's point of view." This is obviously pretty fucking dangerous, because for every improbable win there're the probable forty thousand (or more) failures that fucked the icebergs only to find out the hard way they've now eliminated the false cause they were so sure of and yet the distress endures!

This isn't just me talking: statistics and the studies are there. For example, alarming amounts of sexual realignment surgery recipients have revealed long after the fact that their dreamt cure-all fixed nothing. Sound like a high price to pay for a false cause eliminated? Snip. I'd imagine divorce rates 'round the world attest to the same thing.

Don't ever fall for that. If you do, make sure to learn the first time around. And get some REAL help if you're low for long. There's a lot of authority out there charting out ways of healing and while mating isn't in there ANYWHERE, synergies of therapy and medicine have excellent track records, as long as you aren't returning to the same desolation afterwards.

Oh yeah, but you seem to think this sort of actual help amounts to forfeit and failure, because people are born self-sufficient and straight-out-the-box perfect. Obviously, there's no explanation as to how this seemingly non-pluralist dogma co-exists with the notion that pairing up with some random representative of your preferred gender somehow fixes all your troubles like some Darwinian [E] tank, but there you are. Obviously, it takes some doublethink. Love is a virulent meme, and it takes a constant struggle to keep the fertility-cult sentiment in perspective in this orbital bombardment.

So, I suppose everyone wants to know if I speak from experience here? Yeah. And here's hoping I can keep practicing what I preach.

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