I still detest "EV", and I'm still really upset when HackerNoon's IP underwent serious ransom attempts, and the only thing that saved them was that way back then, they took the initiative to scrape backups of all of their publications and republished it elsewhere. Medium was threatening their very existence. It's never seemed very open to me.
Most folks I guess don't recall that fiasco. I dunno. Just my guts and how they feel when I hear Medium to this day.
It's so good to read you here on the Fediverse, why you chose a masto server instead of something like Friendica or Mitra or any Pleroma/Misskey family member of forks I can't quite glean, but hey.... At least you're here, and I don't mind visiting your website for your 'blogs' :)
I don't mind at all, really.
I can appreciate what you posted, truly, but this kinda stuck out to me. It's seemingly so pertinent to the subject matter:
You said:
> End-of-year festivities are the most challenging, so along with sobriety, I’m beginning to embrace solitude.
I dunno.
And I'm not talking about you here; but rather, me. At some point in my existence, as a successful business owner in a small town, right on the state highway's commercial district with redlights every couple of blocks lolz ... (not really, but it sure felt that way), something crept into the dark abcesses of my mind.
- I can have these kinds of thoughts.
- I'm having these kinds of thoughts.
- There's a freaking difference between "Solitude" and "Isolation".
But truly, and honestly to you right fricken' now, I knew I didn't know that difference.
I already thought that I could pigeonhole and categorize, weigh, measure and....
Nope. Not even fucking close!
But it planted a little gamete in my brain. It started to grow, I didn't really welcome it, but I really should be a celebration of life when there's a diploid.
And it grows. Eventually, I'm a would be um.... news disseminator? I certainly don't rise to the occasion of any title that would suggest that you should read my shit, but I'm beginning to come to terms with the "Solitude" that you so evince as something sacrosanct.
There's a huge difference. There's people like me - "You People", waddaya mean?
Nevermind wut, lolz.
So one day, and totally unrelated (Hand to god it's the fricken' truth) to anything else, it occured to me that, not only am I mortal (I came to this conclusion between 24 and 28 years of age, I dunno, 'hand to god' I swear I dunno when)), but I can't truthfully, for myself, independant upon whatever any other bitch in this world told me to believe, or at least spew narrative of, that I'm really breaking down the world of what I am and what I could have been with what I convoluted through to get where I've arrived at this moment!!!
That moment! Not this moment! A moment years ago, completely not related to how I might feel today.
A moment that everything got clear for the first time since I was prolly in 3rd or 5th grade in school.
There's isolation. And there's solitude. Alright, let's put those two in the mix of what I've been feeling for years and just see what we come up with. Okay?
Well, after a life of living in seemingly mile high skyscrapers and being able to imagine my view from the corner office I have is 40 miles.... After years of lying to myself about this is what I or anyone else would want, I did what any confused, single father who raised his own daughter to the age of consent (She graduatated high school on time | she was not pregnant | and she was not on fucking drugs) would do...
I, in my pathetic, singularly created self-imprisonment would do ... I regressed to a loser piece of shit anyway. The only solace I had was a thriving child that, for better or for worse, didn't fall very far at all from the God Damned Oak Tree - MUahahahahaha. My kid. My itty bitty baby forever and ever..... I saw that I didn't fuck that up.
OH..... what an accomplishment!
Then I pulled the pin on the grenade.
My last contract was for a company that had somehow (I never understood this stuffs) made themselves a public company by making GoDaddy buy them. As soon as everything was done and they were now a publicly traded company, Everyone who either hired me or was associated with C-Level or above roles.... Well they just went 💥 and then, there were none. Maybe one or two, but completely different departments not related to anything techical.
I refused to move to Arizona - way to far from the #Beaches_of_Super_Sunny_Southern_California for this South Bay Boi.
There were a couple of pivitol Orange County gigs that took me a couple of weeks for a chunk "O" cash, but this was it... This was the maker for a hiatus that found me doing the Jeremiah Johnson thing - as totally fucking insane as that sounds (and in reality, might be).
I"mma skip over those six years. four of them totally devoid of human contact (mostly).
There is indeed a difference. But you are growing your own Jalapeno's and Tomatoes, and I'm not good at melons, but a few Canatlope and one or two watermelons? Oh that goes so well with the squash and greens and roots/tubers like carrots or horseradish, I dunno, my garden! Greens,
I'll skip over how I eventually got from an air conditioned machine room in skyscrapers worthy of being flown into by crazy bitches that "don't need to learn how to land", to a veritable Grizzly Adams kinda self-imposed *Solitude, but suffice it to say that I had actually, and voluntarily and with the purpose of a federal mission, placed inserted myself into a place of *Isolation.
It's not bad. Not that bad. Not what you expected.
That's okay, we can take our mind if we try, and cogitate between the bliss of solitude and the approaching bleakness of isolation, and there's indeed a huge dichotomy there, with much shared real estate between the two in your being. In your mind, and yet, you know in your heart that you'll still be mostly functional in the busy debauchery of an after curfew underground club in Hollywood - just like you used to live ... But you're outside looking in now.
Wow.
You start to contemplate your value, and in the end, it surprisingly isn't about your value in society, no, no, no, lolz; it about your value as a fellow inhabitant, with your contemporaries....
Your contemporaries, are comprised of half by those citizens that will eat you, and half by those citizens you shoot so you can eat them.
And then, one day (in my particular insignificant existence) you are approached by a cattle rancher who remembered you were way fucking out there in the mountains and might still be unaware of the news and the fact that you're about to be incinerated in the next 18 or so hours ...
Well, I'll always have that which has proven to be just about as influential as being reared by two loving parents. I've been screamed at my mountain lions that fortunately for them, were too much of a pussy to try and kill me, which would have resulted in their suicide by human.
I've survived a cute little encounter with a big fucking bear (fortunately, NOT a grizzly), when I walked across my kitchen to grab a bulb or garlic for whatever other animal I was about to cook for myself - she (I think she was a she, who knows?) gave me the most uninterested look through the two french glass doors that I've ever seen - so as she turned to lumber away unhurriedly, I still didn't begin to process the sheer terror of realizing that she had no concept of things like windows, and that I was within reach of her swipe that could have removed my face, even through the glass of the doors.
I dunno, shit changes us. Don't it?
I don't believe for one minute that what you're achieving is solitude for the sake of rehabilitation with respect to alcohol. I call bullshit!
What I see, and yes, regardless of how your voyage back from somewhere in the abyss of alcoholism, I see a fellow... I don't have a real word for this. A fellow epiphanyist's duh (Doh! Not EVEN a real word) moment and subsequent repercussions.
Oh yeah, it's good to see someone see those planes. That's not so much a result of recovery from substance abuse, that's an event of enlightenment that most folks don't ever get to hold and cherish ...
Your isolation may be the result of your own self-flagelation. Your isolations may be the result of your inadvertency. Your isolations may be the result of circunstance beyond your influence. It doesn't matter though, when it's an edification from which you rise. A cleansing of some sort, perhaps?
Now, continue to rise :)
Take ownership of your own solitude without the chains of isolation. You no longer need that.
You are of the fortunate. And I'm very happy to see that kind of power in others.
Congrats - Continue - Thrive, my friend. Fair winds and following seas.
#tallship #FOSS #Fediverse
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RE: https://mastodon.social/users/Daojoan/statuses/112074047267141087
npub10txh7ux0f6xvscesg0ls4p9u2cs2dfr0rhvqca689xk00wfuvl4seacrtk (npub10tx…crtk)
5 years ago this week, I was writing the biggest npub1u00djvjjpk6vm09z8vrrkjpnj0s9favacchm00w8qw4ae4ptussq8upzgc (npub1u00…pzgc) blog in the APAC region, and one of the biggest in the world at the time, with over 120,000 followers.
One night, while drunk, depressed and suicidal, I deleted my Medium account and everything I had ever written. Burned it all down.
A couple of months after that, I came to terms with the fact that I was an alcoholic.
Ever since then, I've been rebuilding my life, my career and my work.
it gets better.
