hello, gusto ko lang magrant tungkol sa araw ko kahapon super nakakabwisit kasi at nagbreakdown ako.
morning, nung naghahanap ako ng parking para sa a-applyan kong company nakabangga ako ng rider. di ko alam kung parehas ba kami may mali o ako lang kasi, habang nakatingin ako sa google map, sya pala ay pakanan din. Nagkaareglo naman kami ni kuya at kinonsider ko nalang na mali ako dahil may hinahabol akong oras.
eto na, nung nasa company na ko sabi one day hiring process sya. grabe din sa requirements na pinasa. 6 kami nandun, buti hindi ako yung pinakalate. first part, filling out the forms nila tungkol sa info mo, meron pa magsusulat ka ng autobiography mo (first time ko, makaexperience ng ganito). next, exam. 5 parts ata yun, inabot kami ng 2-3 hours para matapos yun. sabi ni HR, after exam doon daw namin malalaman kung pasado kami for interview. naipasa, ko naman yung exam kahit na may ibang part na mababa kasi grabe wala pa ko kain simula breakfast, so hindi na ko makapagfocus sa exam at gutom na ko. medyo pagod na din kasi grabe inaalala ko padin yung nangyare sakin bago pumunta sa company nila.
eto na, interview parts na. tinanong ni HR na mahaba daw sya. gusto ko ba daw ipareschedule o tuloy ko na. sa isip ko bakit pa ireschedule eh nandun na din naman ako, push na natin. first interview, si HR, ayun tanong lang kung ano mga nilagay ko sa forms nila. after sa kanya, di nya sinabi kung ilan pa kakausapin ko. second interview, yung finance staff kausap ko, nakakainis kasi parang wala naman sila interes makipagusap sayo. alam mo yung aura nila na napipilitan lang. tapos para yung papel na hawak nila na tungkol sayo eh di naman binabasa talaga. third interview, akala ko eto na yung last kasi ang dami nyang tanong, pinagawa pa nya kami ng sample letter sa harap nya. nung mga oras na to, 5:30PM na. grabe lang na para bang pumasok ako ng whole day sa company nila. imagine, applicant palang ganun na kain sa oras.
ayun na nga, 5:30PM akala ko tapos na meron pa pala isang kakausapin yung final interview na. sya ata yung head, sa mga tanong nya may maganda naman ako naisasagot kung paano ako makakapagambag sa kanila. pero mukang ayaw nya sakin kasi iba yung course ko. kahit na nasa engineering kami both. natapos kami magusap 7:30PM na. galing no, OT for interview palang. nakakainis na sana sa hinahanap nila ilagay nila kung ano course ang gusto nila. hindi yung naubos yung buong araw ng wala napala. nakakainis na 10 hours ako doon, tapos wala. hintay nalang daw within a week sabi nung isang hr staff.
pagkabalik ko ng kotse, sobra naiyak nalang ako. breakdown ako, feeling ko failure ako. wala na ko gana magdinner, gusto ko ibangga yung kotse, gusto ko na maglaslas. ang hirap pakalmahin ng utak. wala din kasi ako work na for 11 months kaya grabe ayoko na haha.
ayun lang, kay kuya rider sorry po talaga at dun sa company na yun hay nako bahala kayo.
ty.

Seven
...
In 1945, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were students at Columbia University and were lodging in Joan Vollmer’s apartment on West 115th Street. Kerouac, a Catholic who had gotten in on a football scholarship described Ginsberg as “this spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out…burning black eyes”; the two men had a brief, awkward affair. Their friend William Burroughs was living nearby, on Riverside Drive, and after Kerouac and Ginsberg set him up with their landlady, he moved in, too. The gaunt and lanky Burroughs was more than a decade older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and already seemed, Ginsberg recalled, to have the “ashen gray of an old-age cheek.” The younger pair admired him, Ginsberg wrote, like “ambassadors to a Chinese emperor.” Kerouac hailed him as “the last of the Faustian men.” Burroughs returned the compliment by introducing the other members of the “libertine circle,” as they dubbed themselves, to drugs, sailors, porn, bathhouses, and Wilhelm Reich.

After leaving Harvard in 1936, Burroughs had enrolled at the University of Vienna’s medical schools, Reich’s alma mater, with vague plans of becoming a psychoanalyst, but his stay was dominated by the administration of arsenic shots for the syphilis he had contracted in America, which left him feeling nauseated and depressed. He left after a semester. Back in New York, Burroughs was analyzed by Paul Federn, who had been Reich’s first therapist but whom Reich came to consider his nemesis. Burroughs was institutionalized in 1940 after he chopped off the tip of his finger in a Van Gogh - like gesture of unrequited love (Bellevue psychiatrists diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic). Burroughs’s parents gave him an allowance of two hundred dollars a month on the condition that he seek further help, and in 1946 Burroughs was undergoing narco-analysis with Dr. Lewis Wolberg, who used nitrous oxide and hypnosis to stimulated the unconscious.
Burroughs would return from his sessions with Wolberg to practice “wild analysis” on his friends, interpreting their dreams from the comfort of a wing chair. He also played a game that parodied the Reichian character analysis that he’d become interested in. The group would play an adaption of charades to facilitate the exploration of the onion layers of their personality armor. Burroughs referred to these exercises in amateur dramatics as “routines.” For example, underneath Burroughs’s public persona as the distinguished heir of an important St. Louis family lurked a prissy, lesbian English governess (“My dear, you’re just in time for tea. Don’t say those dirty words in front of everybody!”). Scratch the governess surface and you reached Old Luke, a gun-toting, tobacco-chewing sharecropper from the Deep South (“Ever gut a catfish?”). The last stratum, at his very core, held a silent Chinaman, a contemplative, impassive character who sat meditating on the banks of the Yangtse. Ginsberg’s hidden self was “the well-groomed Hungarian,” and Kerouac liked to play the naïve American lost in the sophistications of Paris.
Alfred Kinsey met Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac on one of their nocturnal trips to Time Square through their friend Herbert Huncke, the male prostitute who coined the term “beat” and introduced Burroughs to recreational drugs. Kinsey paid Huncke
Taking advantage of the proximity of Cott’s office to his father’s home, and still buzzing in the mouth, Ginsberg chose to come out during a posttherapeutic visit. “You mean you like to take men’s penises in your mouth?” his father said unsympathetically. But Cott thought homosexuality a perversion, as Reich did, and was working toward establishing heterosexual primacy rather than trying to persuade Ginsberg to come to terms with his queerness. “Frankly I won’t trust that kind of straight genital Reichian,” Burroughs wrote in disgust at this dogmatism. “Feller say, when a man gets too straight he’s just a god damned prick.”
Cott terminated Ginsberg’s therapy after three months because he continued to smoke pot against the doctor’s advice. Ginsberg though cannabis an integral part of his aesthetic education; Cott feared that it would lead to a psychotic episode. The summer he quit therapy, Ginsberg began experiencing auditory hallucinations. “It was like God had a human voice,” Ginsberg wrote of his transcendental experience, in which he discovered his calling as a poet, “with all the infinite tenderness and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.” Consumed by a desire to share his amazing experience, Ginsberg crawled out onto his fire escape and tapped on the next-door neighbor’s windows, declaring to the two frightened girls inside, “I’ve seen God!”
His father, still reeling from the discovery of his son’s sexuality, feared that he was suffering from the paranoid schizophrenia that had caused his mother to be institutionalized in Pilgrim State, a mental hospital on Long Island. She also heard voices, feared her husband was trying to poison her, hallucinated Hitler’s mustache in the sink, and thought spies were following her. When Ginsberg entered Reichian analysis, she was reportedly banging her head against the wall so ferociously that the doctors recommended a lobotomy.
Ginsberg phoned up Dr. Cott, his former therapist, and told him, “It happened, I had some kind of breakthrough or psychotic experience.” Cott, who followed Reich in rejecting the talking cure, and who was obviously still angry at Ginsberg for choosing pot over therapy, said, “I’m afraid any discussion would have no value” and hung up on him. Soon afterward, when Ginsberg was involved in a car chase in a stolen vehicle that ended in a dramatic crash, he was encouraged by a law professor at Columbia, where he was still a student, to plead insanity. Dr. Cott appeared in court to testify to his mental instability, and two months later Ginsberg was admitted to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric institute, where he stayed for eight months.
During Ginsberg’s hospitalization, Burroughs wrote to Jack Kerouac to ask him to find out from Ginsberg what the “gadget made by Reichians” looked like. “I want especially to know its shape and if there is a window, and how one gets into it.” Kerouac doesn’t seem to have been much help in providing a blueprint. Burroughs built his first accumulator in the spring of 1949 when he was living on a rented farm in Pharr, Texas, with Kells Elvins, a friend from his Harvard days. They were both enthusiastically reading Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy and decided to build an accumulator in the orange grove Kells owned in the Rio Grande Valley. Built without recourse to any plans, the resulting device included some curious innovations. “Inside was an old icebox,” Burroughs explained, “which you could get inside and pull on a contrivance so that another box of sheet steel descended over you, so that the effect was presumably heightened.” It took them a few days to construct the box. The result was eight feet high, much taller than the ones Reich manufactured: “It was a regular townhouse,” Burroughs recalled.
The pair took turns sitting in the accumulator and obtained, Burroughs wrote, “unmistakable results.” Burroughs wondered what the Mexican farm laborers thought of this strange box that they entered “wrapped in old towels,” and came out of feeling “much sexier and healthier,” “with hard-ons.” Burroughs and Kells also made one of Reich’s smaller shooter boxes, with a funnel, which they used as a supplement to the big box. Their DIY was, Burroughs admitted, “a very sloppy job,” but it still have a powerful “sexual kick.”
"I have just been reading Wilhelm Reich’s latest book The Cancer Biopathy,” Burroughs wrote excitedly to Kerouac. “I tell you Jack, he is the only man in the analysis line who is on that beam. After reading the book I built an orgone accumulator and the gimmick really works. The man is not crazy, he’s a fucking genius.” Kerouac described Burroughs enthusiastically promoting the box in On the Road (1955). According to Kerouac, Burroughs said, “Say, why don’t you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice in your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!”
Burroughs used an orgone box on and off for the rest of his life. (There is a picture of the rock star Kurt Cobain waving through the port-hole of Burrough’s last box, a scruffy, patched-up shed that he kept in the garden behind his house in Lawrence, Kansas.) In the 1970s he wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled “All the accumulators I have owned” in which he boasted, “Your intrepid reporter, at age thirty-seven, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas. It was the small, direct-application accumulator that did the trick.”
….
Perls concluded that any positive claims for the orgone box were attributable to the placebo effect. “I invariably found a fallacy,” he said of the orgone box users he met, “a suggestibility that could be directed in any way that I wanted.” Reich, Perls thought, had made a major contribution in giving Freud’s notion of resistance a body, but he erred in trying to make a verifiable reality out of the libido. “Now resistances do exist, there is no doubt about it,” Perls explained, “but libido was and is a hypothesized energy, invented by Freud himself to explain his model of man.” He thought Reich had hypnotized himself and his patients into the belief of the existence of the orgone as the physical and visible equivalent of libido.
Perls found that users of orgone boxes usually exhibited some paranoid symptoms. “Then I had another look at the armor theory,” Perls went on, “and I realized that the idea of the armor itself was a paranoid form. It supposes an attack from, and defense against, the environment.” Perls criticized vegetotherapy for encouraging the formation of paranoid features by encouraging the patient to “externalize, disown, and project material that could be assimilated and become part of the self.” Orgone energy, Perls concluded from his investigations into the orgone box, was “an invention of Reich’s fantasy which by then had gone astray.” The realization that the Reich he had met in New York was different from the one he had known in Europe, and that orgone mysticism was at the crackpot end of science, was tinged with melancholy. “The enfant terrible of the Vienna Institute turned out to be a genius,” Perls wrote in his autobiography, “only to eclipse himself as a ‘mad scientist.’”
In his own elaboration of character analysis, which he called Gestalt therapy, Perls turned the idea of armor around: where Reich had come to see character armor as a defense against a hostile external world, Perls saw that same layer of self as a shield for one’s own true drives - a straitjacket designed to safeguard against explosions of excitement from within. Thus, it wasn’t a shell to be crushed but something integral, to be owned. (Laura Perls said they tried to convince Rosenfeld to give up his box, that he could increase his physical vitality and mental agility “entirely on his own, without external devices.”) He wanted his patients to be aware of their bodies, to feel the present vividly in the “here and now,” to be “authentic,” to act on their desires.
Perls got his patients to act out their feelings so that they could assimilate and take responsibility for them. He had originally wanted to be a theater director - he’d been a student of Max Reinhardt’s when he was growing up in Berlin, and he’d become closely associated with the avant-garde Living Theatre troupe in New York. Julian Beck, a founder of the Living Theatre, explained to Perls’s biographer, Martin Shepard, of Gestalt therapy, “[Perls] had something in mind that was halfway between the kind of performance we were doing [direct spectacle, aimed at challenging the moral complacency of the audience] and therapeutic sessions.”
“You are my client,” Perls told one female patient. “I care for you like an artist, I bring something out that is hidden in you.” He described therapy as if it were a magic trick; the rabbit he claimed to pull out of the hat was a person shorn of the “neurosis of normalcy” and all the bourgeois niceties associated with it. This person, he hypothesized, was confident enough to be selfish, to act on rather than repress all her desires, whatever the social consequences. All the energy that others wasted on repression and concealment, Perls thought, should be available for creative self-expression. Another of Perls’s patients recalled, “Fritz loved some types - open bastard-bitch - open defenses, that type. He didn’t like anyone who would placate him or be too good to him or used good-girl or good-boy defenses - that drove him up the wall.”

Perls’s views ,and some of his methods, were much indebted to those pioneered by Reich in the thirties: Perls would habitually accuse his patients of being “phony” and was deliberately aggressive, much as Reich had been with him. Yet, his observations about the paranoid deviations in Reich’s terminology and thinking were painfully perceptive, precisely because he had built on those very ideas.
In 1951, Perls, Paul Goodman, and a Columbia professor of psychology named Ralph Hefferline published Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Rewritten by Goodman, and bearing all the hallmarks of Goodman’s exasperating style, the book blends Reich’s ideas about energy blocks and flows with Sartre’s cafe philosophy to create an American brand of existentialism turned therapy. The authors intended their self-help book to provide the reader with the tools for revolution: “In recommending [these experiments] to you,” they warned of their mass-market therapy, “we commit an aggressive act aimed at your present status quo and whatever complacency it affords.” They promised immediate liberation, without the hard grind of political struggle; all you had to do was unleash your “authentic” self.
The “excitement” to which the subtitle of the book refers is a generalized libido, an elan vital that is seeking various outlets, not all of them sexual. Life, for Perls, was a series of “unfinished” or “undigested” situation, frustrations that were all waiting their turn for satisfactory closure. “After the available excitement has been fully transformed and experienced, then we have good closure, satisfaction, temporary peace and nirvana,” Perls summarized his position. “A [mere] discharge will barely bring about the feeling of exhaustion and being spent.”
It sounded very like the Reichian orgasm. But for Perls, excitement was no longer exclusively genital, as it was for Reich, and this shift only served to open up numerous other slipways to pleasure. In Reich’s view, the libido theory was an inviolable article of faith. In broadening its range to celebrate oral and anal pleasures, Perls heralded a polymorphously perverse and heretical vision - one that, ironically, would prove particularly amenable to exploitation under capitalism.
In 1952, Perls, his wife, Goodman, Isidore From, Elliott Shapiro, and two others founded the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, headquartered in the Perleses’ apartment and with treatment rooms at 315 Central Park West. The seven founding members met on a weekly basis for group therapy. There was no bureaucratic hierarchy and everyone, including Perls, was subject to the honest criticism that was seen as the key to self-discovery. It was a very public form of character analysis: members of the group would draw one another’s attention to every repression or hang-up, none of which was to be tolerated.
Elliot Shapiro, an ex-boxer and the head of a psychiatric school attached to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, brought a friend to one session; Shapiro’s friend said he “had never witnessed the aggressive and profound battling that went on in those groups. Nobody, virtually nobody, was safe at any time.” Shapiro recalled, “We hammered at each other, and hammered, and hammered - every week. And it was the most vigorous hammering you can image….If you could live through these groups and take the corrections, the insults, the remarks…” Not all the participants had sufficiently thick skins to take such brutal candor. The psychotherapist Jim Simkin left the group because he felt that everyone was “loading elephant shit on him,” as did Ralph Hefferline, a coauthor of Gestalt Therapy.
To promote this new school, Perls traveled from city to city, introducing an audience of psychiatrists, social workers, and other interested parties to his “here and now” philosophy. He taught groups in Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, and Miami how to be sensitive to their bodily needs and to follow their impulses, to be honest and unalienated. He’d be sharp and confrontational as he pushed his awareness techniques on the participants: What are you doing now? What are you experiencing? What are you feeling? Isadore From, who was part of the original New York group, remembers that these occasions were often very dramatic, with “a lot of shaking, trembling, anxiety” - effects that he thought were the result of the audiences’ hyperventilating under the strain of Perls’s relentless goading and questioning.
The New York Institute of Gestalt Therapy also ran public seminars, including one by Goodman, “The Psychology of Sex” (“What you can’t do, teach,” he said with a laugh). Following Reich, it was thought that neurosis could be treated by exposure to sexual pleasure. Goodman made this his area of expertise and people with sexual problems were often referred to him. One was a man who was worried about the quality of his orgasms after prostate surgery. Another thought he might be homosexual; the bisexual Goodman got his penis out and demanded that the patient touch it to help him make a diagnosis. In so doing he was no doubt influenced by Hitschmann, the Viennese analyst who once asked Perls, then tormented by sexual inadequacy, to show him his penis .
In one of Goodman’s group sessions, when someone complained of the lack of sexual companionship, Goodman went around the circle and set up a week’s worth of dates. “See, that wasn’t so difficult,” he reassured her. He was not beyond offering his own neurosis-busting services to patients of either sex, and once agreed to accompany a patient who invited him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. He joked about setting up a College of Sex so as to put his vast experience to educational use. “I’m a sociopath,” he wanted a potential client. In a diary entry written in 1957, Goodman looked back on the previous decade and concluded that he’s made a “false cultus-religion (an obsession)” of sex: “The sexual act itself had just about the meaning of a ritual communion sacrifice.”

I know this is unnecessarily long, so if you are not in the mood for reading, I understand. But I would greatly appreciate anyone who would take the time to read my story that is probably TMI and badly in need of some editing. I just really need some advice from people whose heads are less cloudy than mine.
My fiancé M/42 and I F41 have been together for about 4 years and have known each other since high school. I knew he was a recovering addict when I got together with him but I fell head over heels in love and didn’t see the relapse on the horizon that would occur shortly after the honeymoon phase and would eventually almost kill me - I took a swipe of some mystery powder and touched it to my tongue (fentanyl) thinking it would help me get through the most stressful day of my life as i was ceaning out his place while I was packing him up for detox. It was a total freak accident, I’m not an addict, never done anything like that in my life, I’m a single mom and a kindergarten teacher, but I loved him so much I just followed him down the rabbit hole and honestly just became so disoriented in this world I (naively) didn’t understand or even realize I had signed up for.
Anyway, He literally saved my life, and said I also saved his, because that day is what motivated him to get and stay clean for good despite being an active heroin addict for the majority of his life.
He worked an incredibly thorough program, and he gained more friends, money, and more overall success in 2 years than I’ve been able to scrounge up in an entire lifetime. And it’s no surprise honestly. He’s a special person. Absolutely brilliant, charismatic, driven, and has a heart of gold.
Within a year of getting sober, he moved me and my daughters into a gorgeous home adjacent to a golf course, bought luxury vehicles for both me and him, convinced me to quit my teaching job which was making me miserable, so I could finally be fully present for my girls, and then put a giant diamond ring on my left hand. He completely spoils us. We went from having nothing to having every tangible thing, we could possibly need.
The stability that he provided for us meant the world to a single mom who was barely making ends meet, but it was always just the icing on the cake for me. He’s my best friend in the world, he makes me laugh so hard my mouth hurts from smiling, he show me that he loves even the parts of myself that I don’t find lovable. I found my soulmate.
His program started slipping after 2 1/2 years (last November). He was already struggling in his role of being a stepfather, and we were fighting a lot about parenting stuff. He has a lot to learn, has little patience, and seems to have very unrealistic expectations of my kids. He wanted Parenting to be this effortless thing, and he just doesn’t get that it’s not. And that kids are not always going to behave themselves and that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with them. so we were fighting a lot.
In December, he started complaining about his chronic back pain again (a real issue for him as he’s had five back surgeries due to a snowboarding accident in his early 20s-this was during that height of Purdue Pharma and what got him hooked on pain meds)
While I know he was legitimately in pain, it was also a red flag because pain was the culprit for his last relapse. He decided to go in for a sixth surgery and was told he would have to wait three months. He found a surgeon who has made a lot of profit off of him over the years (as he’s a PI attorney) and was willing to prescribe him generous amounts of pain pills to get him through the three months of increasing pain that he was experiencing. He spent the next three months in bed, depressed, checking out, taking pills depressed, checking out- as I became increasingly suspicious that his behavior was much too loopy for the amount of medication he was being prescribed. I fell into the role of his nurse, and his babysitter. Making sure he didn’t text to nonsense to clients, making sure he didn’t fall and make his back worse, making sure he wasn’t interacting with the kids, etc
I knew he wasn’t being honest with me, but he just kept gaslighting me. It honestly felt like he was psychologically tormenting me, treating me as though I was totally paranoid, heartless and out of line. I thought after the surgery, it would finally get better. I made a promise that I would be there for him because he had never had anyone there for him for the previous surgeries and it had been a really traumatic experience for him in the past. I really stepped up and tried so hard to his rock. The hospital experience was horrific, mainly because no amount of diloted was relieving him of the pain. None of the nurses understood why he needed so much more than everyone else, but I think his tolerance had just become so high.
After that nightmare was finally over I was really counting on things getting better, as the plan was for him to taper off the meds, live pain-free, and get back to normal. It didn’t go that way. It just kept getting worse and no matter how many times I told him that I didn’t trust him he just had an excuse for an explanation for everything. He is a master manipulator and I listened to him do it to everyone, doctors, the pharmacist he formed a “friendship” with, literally everyone.
On Mother’s Day, it got to a point where he couldn’t hide it anymore. He disappeared for the day, Ended up, passing out at a gas station and was unreachable for hours, when he finally came home, the car was all fucked up and he claims it was someone else’s fault. He went straight to his home office and I didn’t see the rest of the night until I walked in on him smoking crushed up pills. After that, he confessed everything to me, including the time that he told me not to check the mail because he had a special surprise for me to thank me for all the love and support I gave him To help him through his surgery. it turned out he had drug dealers sending him drugs in the mail. Needless to say there was no surprise for me me. Just heartbreak and betrayal. I felt like a fool.
I was still processing this the next day when , after insisting on taking a photo of me in these designer sunglasses he purchased for me out of guilt. I asked him not to take my photo, because I had tears in my eyes, but he insisted. He was napping next to me and I opened his phone to erase the photo. we’ve always had each other’s passwords, and have looked through each others photos before for various reasons, sharing photos, etc. I cannot emphasize enough how much I trust his loyalty to me when it comes to anything other than drugs.
But for some reason, all of my photos, the ones I was taking on my phone were showing up in his feed. I was so confused, so I started scrolling through deleting unflattering double chin pictures of myself when I came across that menu photos organized based on face recognition. One of them was his ex. I remember him telling me he deleted all of his photos of her the first time he told me he loved me.
I opened it and scrolled through hundreds of pictures of their happy life together. The pictures got more and more sexual, one of her with her legs spread, another another of them in the bathtub together, her kissing him while he had his hands around her neck, another screenshot of her naked in the shower with a thumbnail shot of him in the corner obviously jerking off to her on FaceTime. Because I’m a masochist I decided to take it one step further and look in his video folder. I found a There I found a thumbnail shot if a close-up of him penetrating her. I watched it and it just completely crushed whatever was left of me.
I’m normally a really passive person, and I just completely lost my mind. I reacted as though I had caught him cheating on me. I just couldn’t handle the physical evidence of such a close up shot of him being inside another woman. It’s stupid because I know, like me, he has a past. Obviously he’s been with other women. Obviously he’s been attracted to them. But it just scarred my brain, I literally haven’t even been able to eat since because I’ve been so nauseous. I know it’s ridiculous, because this is a reality I was well aware existed, but seeing it with my own eyes… I don’t know what to say. Other than that I need a lobotomy.
He says he erased all of those videos and photos from his phone, and something weird happened where all of his photos from the cloud just re-uploaded when he got a new phone. He’s not a technical person and I actually believe him because, aside from being a complete liar when it comes to drugs, he has always show me the upmost, integrity, love and loyalty. So it’s not that I don’t believe him. I just can’t get that image out of my head.
I can’t tell if this intense emotional reaction I’m having would be the same reaction anyone would have if they saw what I saw, or if I’m combining the feelings of betrayal over the gaslighting and the relapse…, the last four months of feeling completely invisible, hopeless, and like he was choosing drugs over me. My mind is like mush and I seriously can’t differentiate between these two very separate issues. I’m so confused, but that’s what gaslighting does to you. It makes you question your reality.
He said that he’s finally willing to go into detox, so at this point, I have waited this long, it would be silly not to stick around and see if he’s finally going to put an end to this. What’s getting me is that he’s still making excuses, still not seeming very remorseful, and is still so deep in self-pity that he doesn’t seem to have any awareness of how badly I’m hurting because of him. It feels like he just doesn’t care. anyone who’s ever loved an addict knows that feeling well.
I’m in Al-anon, and I’m well aware of all of the things I should be doing, focusing on myself, etc. but I’m just not doing well, and I can’t seem to find my way out of this dark hole. Anyone who has made it this far deserves some sort of a Reddit badge of honor. This was more of an autobiography than a simple question. I just wanna hear some outside input because I don’t trust my own mind right now. I’m willing to take your criticism, just please be kind. I know I’ve made mistakes, I’m just hurting so badly. I can’t seem to sort through this. Thank you so much if you took the time to read all of this and still want to respond. You have no idea how much it means to me.

Classic Literature: 1. "The Hanged Man" in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922): - Reference: Eliot's influential modernist poem references the tarot card "The Hanged Man" in the context of spiritual crisis and renewal. - Significance: The card symbolizes sacrifice and surrender, echoing themes of transformation and rebirth explored in Eliot's work.

1. "The Magician" in Somerset Maugham's "The Magician" (1908):
   • Plot Element: Maugham's novel revolves around an occultist and magician named Oliver Haddo, inspired by the tarot card "The Magician."
   • Symbolism: The character embodies the archetype of the Magician, using mystical powers and symbolism associated with the tarot card to drive the narrative.

Contemporary Literature: 3. "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern (2011): - Tarot Influence: The novel features a magical competition between two illusionists, and tarot cards are used as a divinatory tool by one of the characters. - Symbolic Elements: Tarot motifs, including the Fool's journey and card readings, contribute to the atmospheric and mysterious setting of the story.

1. "The Raven Cycle" Series by Maggie Stiefvater (2012-2016):
   • Character Incorporation: The character Ronan Lynch in this series is associated with tarot cards, particularly "The Magician."
   • Narrative Impact: Tarot symbolism is interwoven into the character's development, reflecting themes of power, transformation, and the manipulation of reality.

Magical Realism: 5. "Like Water for Chocolate" by Laura Esquivel (1989): - Tarot Spread Structure: Each chapter in this magical realist novel is introduced with a tarot card, setting the thematic tone for the narrative. - Symbolic Significance: Tarot cards serve as a creative and symbolic framework, guiding readers through the emotional and magical journey of the protagonist.

1. "The House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende (1982):
   • Tarot Readings: The novel includes scenes where characters engage in tarot readings, providing insights into their destinies and influencing the unfolding events.
   • Symbolism: Tarot cards become a symbolic and mystical element, enhancing the magical realism inherent in Allende's storytelling.

Dystopian Fiction: 7. "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood (1985): - Tarot Imagery: Tarot cards, particularly the deck known as the "Jezebels Tarot," appear in the novel as a forbidden and subversive element within the dystopian society. - Resistance Symbolism: The use of tarot cards symbolizes resistance and individual agency in a repressive regime.
From classic literature to contemporary works, tarot cards have served as powerful symbols, narrative devices, and sources of inspiration. Their presence in literature often extends beyond mere divination, delving into themes of fate, transformation, and the complexities of human experience. As a rich tapestry of symbolism, tarot continues to weave its way through the realms of imagination and storytelling, adding layers of meaning to literary narratives.
Fantasy and Magical Themes: 8. "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (1990): - Prophecy and Tarot: The novel incorporates tarot cards as part of the prophecies, and the card "The Tower" plays a significant role in the narrative. - Humorous Twist: Gaiman and Pratchett infuse humor and irreverence into the use of tarot cards, blending fantasy and satire.

1. "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern (2011):
   • Magical Setting: Beyond using tarot cards as a divination tool, the novel features the Le Cirque des Rêves, a magical circus where each tent is inspired by a tarot card.
   • Atmospheric Influence: Tarot symbolism enhances the enchanting and mysterious atmosphere of the story, contributing to the novel's magical realism.

Mystery and Detective Fiction: 10. "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902): - Tarot Card Allusion: The novel contains a reference to a death card that could be interpreted as resembling a tarot card. This adds an element of mystery and foreshadowing to the narrative.

1. "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco (1988):
   • Tarot Conspiracies: Eco's complex novel delves into conspiracies and secret societies, incorporating elements of tarot symbolism as characters explore esoteric mysteries.
   • Intellectual Exploration: Tarot cards become part of the intellectual and symbolic tapestry in a narrative that explores the boundaries between reality and imagination.

Science Fiction: 12. "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson (1992): - Tarot as Code: In this cyberpunk novel, tarot cards are used as a form of code for a virus that plays a crucial role in the plot. - Futuristic Integration: The novel explores how ancient symbols, like those found in tarot, can find new meaning in a futuristic, technology-driven world.
Romance and Relationship Dynamics: 13. "The Lovers" by Vendela Vida (2010): - Tarot Theme: In this novel, the protagonist becomes involved in a project where she creates a deck of tarot cards to explore themes of love and relationships. - Personal Journey: Tarot becomes a tool for self-discovery and reflection on romantic relationships, adding a unique twist to the exploration of love in the narrative.
In literature, tarot cards emerge as versatile narrative tools, blending seamlessly into various genres and themes. Authors employ them for foreshadowing, symbolism, and to explore the complexities of human existence. Whether in the realms of fantasy, mystery, science fiction, or romance, tarot cards contribute to the richness and depth of storytelling, offering readers a glimpse into the mystical and symbolic dimensions of the human experience.
Historical Fiction: 14. "The Eight" by Katherine Neville (1988): - Quest for a Chess Set: The novel weaves a complex narrative involving a quest for a mystical chess set, with each piece representing a tarot card. The tarot cards play a central role in unraveling the mysteries within the story. - Symbolic Elements: Tarot cards are intricately linked to historical events and characters, providing a symbolic framework for the unfolding adventure.

1. "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2001):
   • Tarot Card Readings: The novel features a mysterious character who conducts tarot card readings, offering insights into the destinies of the main characters.
   • Atmospheric Symbolism: Tarot cards contribute to the atmospheric and gothic elements of the narrative, adding layers of mystery and intrigue.

Coming-of-Age Narratives: 16. "The Raven Cycle" Series by Maggie Stiefvater (2012-2016): - Tarot Card Symbolism: Tarot cards, especially "The Magician," play a significant role in the character development and coming-of-age themes of the series. - Personal Growth: The use of tarot reflects the characters' journeys of self-discovery, empowerment, and understanding their places in the world.
Philosophical Exploration: 17. "The Castle of Crossed Destinies" by Italo Calvino (1969): - Silent Characters: In this experimental novel, characters communicate solely through laying out tarot cards to tell their stories. The tarot becomes a visual language, and the narrative explores the interconnectedness of stories and destiny. - Symbolic Interpretation: The novel delves into the nature of narrative, choice, and fate through the lens of tarot symbolism.
Memoir and Autobiography: 18. "M Train" by Patti Smith (2015): - Personal Reflections: In her memoir, Patti Smith reflects on her life, travels, and creative process. Tarot cards appear as a recurring motif, offering glimpses into the author's introspective and spiritual moments. - Intuitive Guidance: The author uses tarot as a tool for personal reflection and guidance, highlighting its role in her creative and spiritual journey.
Literary Criticism: 19. "Tarot as a Way of Life: A Jungian Approach to the Tarot" by Karen Hamaker-Zondag (2001): - Psychological Exploration: This non-fiction work explores tarot from a Jungian perspective, delving into the archetypal and symbolic dimensions of the cards. - Integration with Jungian Psychology: The author uses tarot as a means to explore the collective unconscious and the psychological aspects of the human experience.
Tarot cards continue to be a rich source of inspiration for authors across diverse genres. Whether as a narrative device, a symbolic tool, or a means of philosophical exploration, tarot's presence in literature enhances storytelling by tapping into the mystical, psychological, and symbolic facets of the human condition. As authors weave these archetypal cards into their narratives, readers are invited to explore realms of meaning, mystery, and self-discovery.

As recently as the late 90s, many low support-needs autistics would have had even more severe social challenges and suffered even more isolation than they currently do.¹ The internet provided tons of informational resources that are very useful to autistic people, and made joining in discussions much easier because of the somewhat removed, text-based format we all know and love. But the internet also did something else that was very important: it broke down barriers that prevented the formation of autistic communities.
The internet fixed the geographical density issue that had long made the formation of autistic communities difficult or impossible, and of course online communities have significant accessibility advantages as well.
And as a result all of this new interaction between autistics, websites like wrongplanet.com, groups like Aspies for Freedom and the ASAN were founded, and the Neurodiversity Paradigm became the prominent understanding of autism among these autistics. In the early 2000s, the neurodiversity movement really took form in the heart of those online forums and communities made for autistics.
However, there is a problem with all of this.
Lately I’ve been reading some of the foundational texts of the neurodiversity movement, such as essays by Nick Walker, because I was curious to see how some of the ideas of the neurodiversity paradigm formed in their early stages. Although I agree with what they have to say, largely, one key issue stands out to me: the way they talk about autism almost completely seems to neglect level 2s/3s who are more severely disabled (for example, intellectually, or otherwise) because of autism.²
The social model does NOT completely explain autism, as some may claim. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, and sometimes that creates some really big problems with development during childhood in a way that means you don’t really ever start developing at all, or only extremely slowly. As they grow up, that is not something that will go away. Some autistics struggle even with things like using the bathroom as fully grown adults. Some cannot form full sentences. My boyfriend’s brother is one such person. Texts on neurodiversity, while very helpful to me, often seem to have completely forgotten people like him.
Lower support needs autistics also often speak over and invalidate those with higher support needs.³ I came across a perfect example of this in a comment a couple of weeks ago, from a non-autism related subreddit:

As someone who has been diagnosed as autistic, nothing frustrates me more than seeing anyone, autistic or no, try to use their mental health condition as an excuse instead of, at best, an explanation.
Sure, it's a lot harder to learn social behaviors, but it can be done.

300+ upvotes. Sad.
Now, I’m sure I don’t need to break down what’s wrong here.⁴ You guys know. But what I’d like to discuss is the why. While they may seem unrelated, I think these two things, the lack of inclusion of severely disabled autistics in writings about neurodiversity, and the tendency of some level 1s to say bullshit like that, have the same underlying cause:
I think there is a survivorship bias problem in the autism community.
While the inernet allows us to meet so many other autistic people, it’s only a limited subset of autistics. Those with very high support needs, or whose presentation of autism makes them wholly uninterested in joining online communities/discussing autism online, never make it into such communities.
It’s very easy to see the broad neurodiversity of these online spaces and think that it must be most of the autism spectrum. But it isn’t, it’s only autistics that would be in such places in the first place! And so, it is very easy to walk away with a view of autism disproportionately skewed towards those with lower support needs, with many autistics completely missing from this vantage point.
I hope that one of the best solutions to this is simply awareness. So, here is that for you. Consider yourself aware.

1. If you’re curious to see what life was like, I recommend the book, Aquamarine Blue 5. It’s a short little collection of autistic autobiographies published in 2001, each one describing their experience in college. I’ve only read some of it so far, but I’ve found it illuminating and extremely interesting to compare and contrast my own life.
   
2. Frankly, the only online group that consistently seems to remember that such people exist is the “Autism Moms”. Granted, they also sometimes think it’s the ONLY kind of autism that exists.
   
3. Shoutout to SpicyAutism for first calling attention to this for me. If you visit, please make sure to respect that it’s a space for those with moderate to high support needs — dont go posting here regularly if you are not. I only ever comment, personally, when I decide that a particular discussion is probably also open to me.
   
4. Please comment and ask for a breakdown if you need it :)
   

As recently as the late 90s, many low support-needs autistics would have had even more severe social challenges and suffered even more isolation than they currently do.¹ The internet provided tons of informational resources that are very useful to autistic people, and made joining in discussions much easier because of the somewhat removed, text-based format we all know and love. But the internet also did something else that was very important: it broke down barriers that prevented the formation of autistic communities.
The internet fixed the geographical density issue that had long made the formation of autistic communities difficult or impossible, and of course online communities have significant accessibility advantages as well.
And as a result all of this new interaction between autistics, websites like wrongplanet.com, groups like Aspies for Freedom and the ASAN were founded, and the Neurodiversity Paradigm became the prominent understanding of autism among these autistics. In the early 2000s, the neurodiversity movement really took form in the heart of those online forums and communities made for autistics.
However, there is a problem with all of this.
Lately I’ve been reading some of the foundational texts of the neurodiversity movement, such as essays by Nick Walker, because I was curious to see how some of the ideas of the neurodiversity paradigm formed in their early stages. Although I agree with what they have to say, largely, one key issue stands out to me: the way they talk about autism almost completely seems to neglect level 2s/3s who are more severely disabled (for example, intellectually, or otherwise) because of autism.²
The social model does NOT completely explain autism, as some may claim. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, and sometimes that creates some really big problems with development during childhood in a way that means you don’t really ever start developing at all, or only extremely slowly. As they grow up, that is not something that will go away. Some autistics struggle even with things like using the bathroom as fully grown adults. Some cannot form full sentences. My boyfriend’s brother is one such person. Texts on neurodiversity, while very helpful to me, often seem to have completely forgotten people like him.
Lower support needs autistics also often speak over and invalidate those with higher support needs.³ I came across a perfect example of this in a comment a couple of weeks ago, from a non-autism related subreddit:

As someone who has been diagnosed as autistic, nothing frustrates me more than seeing anyone, autistic or no, try to use their mental health condition as an excuse instead of, at best, an explanation.
Sure, it's a lot harder to learn social behaviors, but it can be done.

300+ upvotes. Sad.
Now, I’m sure I don’t need to break down what’s wrong here.⁴ You guys know. But what I’d like to discuss is the why. While they may seem unrelated, I think these two things, the lack of inclusion of severely disabled autistics in writings about neurodiversity, and the tendency of some level 1s to say bullshit like that, have the same underlying cause:
I think there is a survivorship bias problem in the autism community.
While the inernet allows us to meet so many other autistic people, it’s only a limited subset of autistics. Those with very high support needs, or whose presentation of autism makes them wholly uninterested in joining online communities/discussing autism online, never make it into such communities.
It’s very easy to see the broad neurodiversity of these online spaces and think that it must be most of the autism spectrum. But it isn’t, it’s only autistics that would be in such places in the first place! And so, it is very easy to walk away with a view of autism disproportionately skewed towards those with lower support needs, with many autistics completely missing from this vantage point.
I hope that one of the best solutions to this is simply awareness. So, here is that for you. Consider yourself aware.

1. If you’re curious to see what life was like, I recommend the book, Aquamarine Blue 5. It’s a short little collection of autistic autobiographies published in 2001, each one describing their experience in college. I’ve only read some of it so far, but I’ve found it illuminating and extremely interesting to compare and contrast my own life.
   
2. Frankly, the only online group that consistently seems to remember that such people exist is the “Autism Moms”. Granted, they also sometimes think it’s the ONLY kind of autism that exists.
   
3. Shoutout to SpicyAutism for first calling attention to this for me. If you visit, please make sure to respect that it’s a space for those with moderate to high support needs — dont go posting here regularly if you are not. I only ever comment, personally, when I decide that a particular discussion is probably also open to me.
   
4. Please comment and ask for a breakdown if you need it :)
   

I recently read Richard Wright’s autobiography which dealt in part with his tumultuous time as a member of a U.S. communist group in the 1930’s. I also read a number of Orwell’s essays written shortly after the Spanish civil war in which he discusses the ideology. One thing Orwell brought up that I thought was interesting (partly quoted below) was the pervasive self-censorship by communist western writers during that time. Makes sense - nearly all US/UK communist parties were more or less emulating USSR standards.
Among the many issues Wright encountered while he was a member was the constant peer pressure to censor not just what he said in official writings (eg for their magazine), but also his own work. If any party member stepped out of line (or was even perceived to have - which was troublesome due to how much paranoia raged throughout the group) all sorts of bullying tactics were use. Such as expelling, threatening, shunning, attempting to get former members fired at their job, assaulting them on the streets, or worst of all being called a Trotsky-isk (it’s like being called a mix of Benedict Arnold, Hitler, and a 5 month old puppy that a spoiled child has grown bored of)
This censorship counters something I have noticed is more common in writers/artists than the average person - the desire for freedom of expression. what about the movement was appealing enough for writers to fight for something that denies this? (and perhaps huge portion of the entire literary canon)
But the core question is this: what caused writers / artists to be drawn to communism at higher rates than most other professions?
Most often when reading the work of those actively in favor, they talk earnestly of social and economic equality for all. But if that was truly their primary end goal, socialism alone seems more closely to align with it without the need for censorship. Furthermore, socialism was a moderately prevalent & established ideology at the turn of the 20th century (and had a number of notable writers gaining success releasing works with overarching socialist themes - eg Upton Sinclair & Jack London & Orwell). Was it just seen as old hat (too slow, ineffective) at that point? Or is the focus on the employed lower class just not personally applicable enough for an artist fortunate enough to survive on the profit of their art?
A while ago I read an essay by Chomsky in which he quoted a bit by either Marx or Engels indicating that the ideology has always hinted at a sort of aristocratic literati. Was this what really brought so many writers in (more than fixing economic inequality issues already addressed by socialism)? Sure, the revolution theoretically frees the workers & disposed of great economic inequality, but ( better yet) with our artistic skills we will be reserved a special place right at the foot of the ideological ruler’s throne! Who cares if it’s as jester or propagandist, we will still find ourselves comfortably sat near the table of power. not in the fields toiling, but amongst the intellectual elites. They can see through the propaganda.
(This brings to mind an article by a journalist stuck in an air conditioned hotel somewhere like Qatar with a bunch of other journalists during the Iraq war c. 2003. Every day they would come out to watch a news conference by a low ranking general who never appeared to know anything nor have any updates. The part that irked me was when the journalist wrote that every journalist in that room was rolling their eyes & joking about the bullshit waste of time… yet the journalists continued writing up & sending out the regurgitated bullshit en masse, acting like they were getting break news & the US people were being informed of it.
The journalists all know they’re being toyed with, so if those people who read the trickle down news conference updates and believed anything but the same - they were contemptuously stupid & deserve their own eye roll, no doubt.
Completely ignoring another option entirely - don’t carry on with the charade of being a government mouth piece… the press could print meaningful journalism or push real questions to the 1 star or call them out on the obfuscation [who else could? Only media allowed]. No, just an eye roll and jokes amongst themselves while they continue to perfectly fulfill their place as the apparatchiks, but at least they know it’s a farce.)
too pessimistic?
Orwell:

On the whole the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics. For any writer who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political party is sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up. It is, of course, possible to toe the line and go on writing—after a fashion. […] Literature as we know it is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship.
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. […] it is a product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual. No decade in the past hundred and fifty years has been so barren of imaginative prose as the nineteen-thirties. There have been good poems, good sociological works, brilliant pamphlets, but practically no fiction of any value at all. From 1933 onwards the mental climate was increasingly against it. Anyone sensitive enough to be touched by the Zeitgeist was also involved in politics. Not everyone, of course, was definitely in the political racket, but practically everyone was on its periphery and more or less mixed up in propaganda campaigns and squalid controversies. Communists and near-Communists had a disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It was a time of labels, slogans, and evasions. At the worst moments you were expected to lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of lies; at the best a sort of voluntary censorship ('Ought I to say this? Is it pro-Fascist?') was at work in nearly everyone's mind.
It is almost inconceivable that good novels should be written in such an atmosphere. 'Good novels are not written by by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Edward Gibbon

08 May 1737 – 16 January 1794
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Edward Gibbon and the Civilizational Perspective
Wednesday 08 May 2024 is the 287th anniversary of the birth of Edward Gibbon (08 May 1737 to 16 January 1794), who was born on this date in 1737.
We have a record of both the beginning and the end of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which add a note of personal poignancy of that great monument of Enlightenment thought, since Gibbon supplied us with the lived experience bookends of the experience of writing his book. Here is how he described his initial inspiration:

“It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the city rather than of the empire: and though my reading and reflections began to point towards that object, some years elapsed, and several avocations intervened, before I was seriously engaged in the execution of that laborious work.”

On 27 June 1787, just shy of 23 years later, Gibbon finished his great project, and he memorialized the moment with a note that appears in his posthumously published autobiography:

“I have presumed to mark the moment of conception: I shall now commemorate the hour of my final deliverance. It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future fate of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.”

Gibbon was living in Switzerland when he finished his book, for the simple reason that he could do his work remotely and the costs of living in Switzerland were cheaper than living as he would have lived in England. Thus Gibbon was able to enjoy the view of the lakes and mountains of Switzerland that he mentions in this passage.
Gibbon’s tale grew in the telling. When he first conceived the work, it was to describe the decline and fall of the city of Rome. Gibbon’s work grew to a narrative of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and, having come thus far, Gibbon then also narrated another thousand years of the ultimate failure of the Eastern Roman Empire, which had become Byzantium. In a letter to Sigmund Münz, Ferdinand Gregorovious said that he had returned to Gibbon’s original project, which Gibbon had effectively abandoned by expanding his work to a greater scope:

“This conception of medieval Rome as a city originated with me. I gave it a literary form and carried out Gibbon’s first idea; for it is well known that he had originally intended to write the history of the city of Rome during the middle ages.”

Gibbon’s book, once completed, comprehended well over a thousand years of history. Greater spans of history had been covered by others, but no one else brought historiographical unity of treatment to this longue durée account of an epoch of western civilization. The title of Gibbon’s book—The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—is familiar to everyone with the merest passing acquaintance with history. Even the idea of a “decline and fall” has become something of a cultural meme. The idea of the “decline and fall” of a civilization is as familiar as the idea of the rise and fall of civilizations over historical time.
The eventual comprehensive form that Gibbons project took forced Gibbon to think from a civilizational perspective. Because of its comprehensive, civilizational scope covering more than a thousand years, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall narrates the histories of many peoples, many societies, and events of many different kinds, which means that some periods receive detailed attention while others are glossed over. Gibbon’s history lingers over events he finds most interesting while passing with barely a notice over events that do not stand up to his implicit standards of historical interest.
What are Gibbon’s implicit standards of historical interest? We find a clue to this late in the book when Gibbon skates over a great deal of material and acknowledges his reasons for doing so:

“…the events by which the fate of nations is not materially changed, leave a faint impression on the page of history, and the patience of the reader would be exhausted by the repetition of the same hostilities, undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect.” (Chapter XLVI: Troubles In Persia.—Part I.)

By these criteria, historical interest for Gibbon is defined by events by which the fate of nations are materially changed, when hostilities are not mere repetitions, when they are undertaken with good cause, then are prosecuted with glory, and are terminated with great effect. This is what I mean by thinking on a civilizational scale, and from a civilizational perspective. By acknowledging that he was largely passing over events that do not meet his criteria of historical interest, Gibbon also implicitly acknowledges the possibilities of other histories that conform to other criteria of historical interest.
Georg Ostrogorsky, in his classic History of the Byzantine State, which goes into great detail on matters that Gibbon only touched upon in passing, cites several Enlightenment thinkers who shared Gibbon’s relative lack of interest in the Byzantine half of the empire:

“The seventeenth-century interest in Byzantium had had remarkable results, particularly in France. Byzantine studies, however, met with a most unfortunate setback in the eighteenth century. The enlightened age of rationalism was proud of its ‘reason’, its philosophical outlook and its religious scepticism, and it despised the history of the whole medieval period. It was particularly contemptuous of the conservative and religiously minded Byzantine Empire whose history was merely ‘a worthless collection of orations and miracles’ (Voltaire), ‘a tissue of rebellions, insurrections and treachery’ (Montesquieu), or at best only a tragic epilogue to the glory of Rome. And so Byzantine history was shown as the thousand years’ decline of the Roman Empire by Charles Lebeau in his Histoire du Bas Empire (Paris, 1757-86) and by Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776-88). Gibbon himself declared that his work described ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’.” (pages 6-7)

Different standards of historical interest suggest the possibility of not only different histories—which, of course, have been written, and many of them—but also different conceptions of history.
Gibbon’s criteria that I quoted earlier for events that do not pass the threshold of materially chaing the fate of nations—“the same hostilities, undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect”—constitute an the “ebb-and-flow” conception of history as applied to civilizations. What do I mean by an “ebb-and-flow” conception of history as applied to civilizations? It is often implied that civilizations have histories, whereas societies below the proper threshold of history merely experience events as an “ebb-and-flow” without any pattern or directionality. These societies are not civilizations, properly speaking, and it is for this reason that they are rightly passed over with little or no mention.
This idea that only civilizations have a history, properly speaking, is given one form by Hugh Trevor-Roper’s criterion of “purposive movement” as definitive of history:

“…history, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintegration. If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason why we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped; or shall I seek to avoid the indignation of the medievalists by saying, from which it has changed?”

This is from The Rise of Christian Europe (page 9) and Trevor-Roper made the same point in an interview. A 1992 paper by Finn Fuglestad, “The Trevor-Roper Trap or the Imperialism of History. An Essay,” takes up Trevor-Roper’s purposive movement criterion from the perspective of an Africanist. While much of this paper is taken up with some parochial concerns of African vs. European history, it has applications to Gibbon’s implicit criteria of the properly historical:

“I shall argue later that the very notion of ‘purposive-movement’ history is to my mind absurd. But first I wish to make it clear that I find any distinction between ‘barbarians’ and ‘non-barbrarians’ highly questionable. By accepting such a distinction one also accepts the establishment of a sort of hierarchy or ranking list between cultures and civilizations; that is, one transforms history into a sort of Championship or Olympic Games. The problem here is twofold: first, such a viewpoint of history hinders any attempt to understand and/or acquire insight into a society or civilization within the framework of its own values and notions. Second, once one begins to evaluate societies and civilizations the question becomes on which norms and values should such an evaluation be based? The answer is all too obvious: the norms and standards pertaining to the dominant culture or civilization of the time. And the dominant civilization has been for the last five hundred years or so—and still is, of course—that of the West. Finally, it is all too easy to dismiss phenomena one cannot make head or tail of—for instance, the past of cultures one has difficulty deciphering—by qualifying them as the ‘unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes’.”

In the same paper, Fuglestad introduces the concept of what he calls “ebb-and-flow” history:

“…the contention that only ‘purposive-movement’ history is ‘real’ history needs to be rejected. I feel strongly that the only acceptable definition of history is that it is the study of the past, any past, including, for want of a better term, ‘ebb-and-flow’ history. Everything (or at least nearly everything) that has happened in the past ought to be of equal importance to the historian since it all partakes of the experience of mankind. It is this experience in all its diversity which we need to unravel and to comprehend as far as possible—if, that is, we want to understand ‘how we came to where we are’ and what and where we are not.”

What I am suggesting is that Gibbon implicitly made a distinction between history that is purposive movement, which rises to the level of historical interest worth narrating, and history that is an ebb-and-flow movement, which does not rise to the level of historical interest. However—and this is an important qualification—Gibbon allows that both forms of history can apply to civilizations. Gibbon chooses to narrate the purposive movement of civilization, and he largely passes over the ebb-and-flow of civilizations.
With Gibbon we can reasonably ask whether the criterion of purposive movement is precisely applicable, as Gibbon chose for his grand theme the decline and fall of Rome. Gibbon was not writing about the purposive movement of Roman history, unless we count the dissolution of a purposive movement as part of that purposive movement. I think this would be a reasonably way to construe history, that is, that a civilization in decline exhibits purposive movement, since as a civilization is failing it usually attempts a number of rearguard actions intended to retain and maintain the viability of its purposive movement, and these attempts are not at an end until the civilization itself is at an end. Certainly the decline and fall of a civilization is a material change in history, and we could make a finer distinction between purposive movement and material change.
We also could make a distinction between narrow and wide conceptions of what constitutes purposive movement in history, with the narrow conception being applicable to what Spengler calls high cultures prior to their entering into the stage of civilizational decadence and ultimate dissolution. The wide conception of purposive movement, on the other hand, would be the entire history of a civilization, from its earliest inception, when its purposive movement is still inchoate, to its final extinction, as its purposive movement grinds down to a standstill.
If Gibbon had implicitly held the narrow conception of purposive movement in history, he would likely have taken up Livy’s theme of the origins of Rome. The failure and collapse of Rome was, after all, counter to the purposes of the Romans, and happened in the teeth of all efforts to save the empire. But if we look at Roman civilization from the outside, from this perspective we can see the decline and fall of Rome as coincident with the purposive movement of the growth of Christianity and the expansion of northern European peoples into the Mediterranean Basin. All of these historical movements are integrated in actual history and bound up in each other. We could tell this story as a sequence of overlapping and intersecting historical movements. Gibbon chose to make all of this a part of the grand purposive movement, in the wider sense I mentioned, of the decline and fall of Rome. And within this grand purposive movement of Roman history, Gibbon was willing to treat ebb-and-flow history brusquely, even when it was the ebb-and-flow of civilization, which could also be understood as periods of stagnation.
Gibbon, obviously, doesn’t use the language of either purposive movement or ebb-and-flow history. Both of these are ideas from the twentieth century that I am reading into Gibbon as a way to understand what he found to be of historical interest, that is to say, worth narrating. We can defuse some of the disagreements of what is of proper historical interest, that is, the scope of history, or what we might call proper historicity, by making appropriate distinctions, as I have been suggesting here. Better yet, beyond a mere distinction between purposive movement and ebb and flow history, we could formulate a taxonomy of histories that would include both of these, perhaps with these two constituting the end points of a continuum of histories that stretch from purposive movement at one end to ebb-and-flow at the other end.
A taxonomy of histories is already implicitly known to us. Since the late twentieth century, micro-history has played an increasing role in historiography. Few question the value of, and many recognize the insights gained by, the detailed examination of a given village, or a particular life in the past that happens to be well documented—and most lives in the past were not well documented. John Romer’s book and television series Ancient Lives brought to life the ordinary events in the lives of individuals who lived thousands of years ago. I don’t believe that Romer was aiming at micro-history, but there is a significant overlap between archaeology and micro-history. The evidence of the past uncovered by archaeology often documents the lives of humble people, though the fantastic finds of tombs filled with gold and jewels may receive far more attention. Archaeologists have largely embraced this historical miniaturism and they now sift the remains of earlier excavations, in which only treasures were sought, to find the small clues that allow for the reconstruction of the lives of ordinary people in the distant past.
Compared with this historical miniaturism, Gibbon presents a grand sweep of history, from the height of the empire to its final dissolution in 1453 AD with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. This is what I called Gibbon’s civilizational perspective. We can identify even grander sweeps of history that have appeared since Gibbon’s time, especially in what has come to be called speculative philosophy of history as exemplified by Spengler and Toynbee. As we saw in the episode on Toynbee, he doesn’t limit himself to the decline and fall of one civilization, but maps out the panorama of the rise and fall of multiple civilizations over historical time. One could argue that this speculative philosophy of history passes a threshold that Gibbon did not cross, and for this reason we can call Gibbon’s work history, while the other work we could deny as being any kind of history. But we recognize, even in so saying, that Spengler and Toynbee have become stalking horses, and there are many other attempts to draw a larger historical picture than Gibbon, as in contemporary big history.
We could argue that micro-history falls below the threshold of proper historicity, and ought correctly to be understood as historical sociology. And we could argue, as above, that Toynbee is philosophy of history, or meta-history, and therefore not within the scope of proper historicity. Or we could accept that history ranges across the spectrum, but what distinguishes Gibbon’s history is that is the history of a civilization—or, at least, part of the history of a civilization. It isn’t the micro-history of one Roman city—though it might have been that if Gibbon had stuck with his original plan, later taken over by Gregorovius, of writing the history only of the city of Rome. And it isn’t an attempt at universal history, whether the universal history of Bossuet before Gibbon or the universal history of Toynbee after Gibbon. It is, as I said, a civilizational history.
Gibbon gives us the civilizational perspective on Rome and what we might call Roman-adjacent civilizations. Micro-history occurs on a scale below that of civilizational history, but it is still history. And the whole of human history is more than civilizational history, but it is still history. In my episode on Gregorovius I called this historical space between micro-history and big history meso-history, since it occurs somewhere near the middle of the scale of objects that might be of historical interest. Even within meso-history we can make distinctions of greater or lesser scope. Gibbon’s history branching through several closely related civilizations is near the higher end of the scale of meso-history, while Gregorovius’ history of Rome, being a little less comprehensive, is lower down the scale.
The meta-historical scale above the scope of Gibbon’s history verges on philosophy of history, as we see in the works of Spengler and Toynbee. Meso-history maybe philosophical as well. We saw in yesterday’s episode on Hume that the Enlightenment historians were sometimes called philosophical historians. We also can find warnings about reading any philosophy of history into Gibbon. For example, Paul Cartledge wrote: “Unhappily for those intellectual historians of today who wish to reconstruct or invent an elaborate Gibbonian ‘philosophy of history,’ Gibbon was not a systematic thinker.” It is true that Gibbon was not a systematic thinker, and the philosophy of history we would find in his work would not be a systematic philosophy of history.
We can also find claims that all history involves a philosophy of history. William Paton Ker wrote: “There is an implicit philosophy of history in every modern historian, even when like Gibbon or Macaulay he may seem for the time to have no interest beyond the narrative.” In my episode on Philosophy of History before Augustine I discussed the view of Hayden White that every history is predicated upon a philosophy of history, whether or not this philosophy is ever made explicit.
Gibbon was one of the great Enlightenment thinkers, and he brought his Enlightenment perspective to his civilizational history of Rome. In my episode of yesterday on Hume I said that Hume’s philosophy, also an artifact of the Enlightenment, implied a deflationary philosophy of history, and I quoted Gibbon on the role of miracles. In Gibbon’s essentially naturalistic narrative, even if guardedly naturalistic, he does exemplify the deflationary ideal by eliminating appeals to supernatural causes.
Insofar as Gibbon’s naturalism converges on our naturalism, we read him like a contemporary who shares much of our conceptual framework. For his reason, it is often difficult to see the problems with a perspective that we share with the author. As I mentioned in my episode on Marx, we don’t necessarily want to completely think our way into an author’s conceptual framework, as this eliminates any critical distance between ourselves and the work. But Gibbon has been around long enough for his critics to have seen the shortcomings of his work, at least, the shortcomings by their lights. Mark T. Gilderhus in History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction (p. 39) wrote of the later response to Gibbon:

“Critics such as Robin G. Collingwood in the twentieth century attacked Enlightenment historians on the grounds that their insensitivity in effect violated the integrity of history. More specifically, they failed to empathize properly with the historical actors or comprehend their behavior accurately on their own terms. Rather, Enlightenment scholars indulged in exposés, reviling the past to obliterate and overcome it. Consequently, Collingwood denounced their writing as an enterprise gone fundamentally wrong. They had failed to carry out the historian’s primary task, that is, to elucidate the past, not merely to condemn it.”

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Enlightenment history was fundamentally wrong, but its perspective does incorporate limitations and blindspots, as does any distinctive perspective. A history on the civilizational scale, like Gibbon’s, is not going to be focused on reenacting the thoughts of historical agents, which was Collingwood’s focus. This smacks too much of historical miniaturism. And Collingwood, on the other hand, isn’t going to be forced into making the kind of abstract conceptual distinctions among kinds of history that I have attributed to Gibbon. Enlightenment historiography is highly abstract, even artificial, and for that reason, distant and often unsympathetic, but by taking this grand civilizational perspective, it reveals dimensions of history that are not shown in as sharp relief by the methods of reenactment, historical sociology, or microhistory.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/YPA6_Wk_9lc
https://www.instagram.com/p/C6vjb8_t8di/
https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/edward-gibbon-and-the-civilizational:c

Podcast Edition

https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/O0owybkesJb
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-today-in-philosophy-of-his-146507578/episode/edward-gibbon-and-the-civilizational-perspective-174746331/
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-today-in-philosophy-of-his-146507578/episode/edward-gibbon-and-the-civilizational-perspective-174746331/
​

Classic Literature: 1. "The Hanged Man" in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922): - Reference: Eliot's influential modernist poem references the tarot card "The Hanged Man" in the context of spiritual crisis and renewal. - Significance: The card symbolizes sacrifice and surrender, echoing themes of transformation and rebirth explored in Eliot's work.

1. "The Magician" in Somerset Maugham's "The Magician" (1908):
   • Plot Element: Maugham's novel revolves around an occultist and magician named Oliver Haddo, inspired by the tarot card "The Magician."
   • Symbolism: The character embodies the archetype of the Magician, using mystical powers and symbolism associated with the tarot card to drive the narrative.

Contemporary Literature: 3. "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern (2011): - Tarot Influence: The novel features a magical competition between two illusionists, and tarot cards are used as a divinatory tool by one of the characters. - Symbolic Elements: Tarot motifs, including the Fool's journey and card readings, contribute to the atmospheric and mysterious setting of the story.

1. "The Raven Cycle" Series by Maggie Stiefvater (2012-2016):
   • Character Incorporation: The character Ronan Lynch in this series is associated with tarot cards, particularly "The Magician."
   • Narrative Impact: Tarot symbolism is interwoven into the character's development, reflecting themes of power, transformation, and the manipulation of reality.

Magical Realism: 5. "Like Water for Chocolate" by Laura Esquivel (1989): - Tarot Spread Structure: Each chapter in this magical realist novel is introduced with a tarot card, setting the thematic tone for the narrative. - Symbolic Significance: Tarot cards serve as a creative and symbolic framework, guiding readers through the emotional and magical journey of the protagonist.

1. "The House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende (1982):
   • Tarot Readings: The novel includes scenes where characters engage in tarot readings, providing insights into their destinies and influencing the unfolding events.
   • Symbolism: Tarot cards become a symbolic and mystical element, enhancing the magical realism inherent in Allende's storytelling.

Dystopian Fiction: 7. "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood (1985): - Tarot Imagery: Tarot cards, particularly the deck known as the "Jezebels Tarot," appear in the novel as a forbidden and subversive element within the dystopian society. - Resistance Symbolism: The use of tarot cards symbolizes resistance and individual agency in a repressive regime.
From classic literature to contemporary works, tarot cards have served as powerful symbols, narrative devices, and sources of inspiration. Their presence in literature often extends beyond mere divination, delving into themes of fate, transformation, and the complexities of human experience. As a rich tapestry of symbolism, tarot continues to weave its way through the realms of imagination and storytelling, adding layers of meaning to literary narratives.
Fantasy and Magical Themes: 8. "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (1990): - Prophecy and Tarot: The novel incorporates tarot cards as part of the prophecies, and the card "The Tower" plays a significant role in the narrative. - Humorous Twist: Gaiman and Pratchett infuse humor and irreverence into the use of tarot cards, blending fantasy and satire.

1. "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern (2011):
   • Magical Setting: Beyond using tarot cards as a divination tool, the novel features the Le Cirque des Rêves, a magical circus where each tent is inspired by a tarot card.
   • Atmospheric Influence: Tarot symbolism enhances the enchanting and mysterious atmosphere of the story, contributing to the novel's magical realism.

Mystery and Detective Fiction: 10. "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902): - Tarot Card Allusion: The novel contains a reference to a death card that could be interpreted as resembling a tarot card. This adds an element of mystery and foreshadowing to the narrative.

1. "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco (1988):
   • Tarot Conspiracies: Eco's complex novel delves into conspiracies and secret societies, incorporating elements of tarot symbolism as characters explore esoteric mysteries.
   • Intellectual Exploration: Tarot cards become part of the intellectual and symbolic tapestry in a narrative that explores the boundaries between reality and imagination.

Science Fiction: 12. "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson (1992): - Tarot as Code: In this cyberpunk novel, tarot cards are used as a form of code for a virus that plays a crucial role in the plot. - Futuristic Integration: The novel explores how ancient symbols, like those found in tarot, can find new meaning in a futuristic, technology-driven world.
Romance and Relationship Dynamics: 13. "The Lovers" by Vendela Vida (2010): - Tarot Theme: In this novel, the protagonist becomes involved in a project where she creates a deck of tarot cards to explore themes of love and relationships. - Personal Journey: Tarot becomes a tool for self-discovery and reflection on romantic relationships, adding a unique twist to the exploration of love in the narrative.
In literature, tarot cards emerge as versatile narrative tools, blending seamlessly into various genres and themes. Authors employ them for foreshadowing, symbolism, and to explore the complexities of human existence. Whether in the realms of fantasy, mystery, science fiction, or romance, tarot cards contribute to the richness and depth of storytelling, offering readers a glimpse into the mystical and symbolic dimensions of the human experience.
Historical Fiction: 14. "The Eight" by Katherine Neville (1988): - Quest for a Chess Set: The novel weaves a complex narrative involving a quest for a mystical chess set, with each piece representing a tarot card. The tarot cards play a central role in unraveling the mysteries within the story. - Symbolic Elements: Tarot cards are intricately linked to historical events and characters, providing a symbolic framework for the unfolding adventure.

1. "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2001):
   • Tarot Card Readings: The novel features a mysterious character who conducts tarot card readings, offering insights into the destinies of the main characters.
   • Atmospheric Symbolism: Tarot cards contribute to the atmospheric and gothic elements of the narrative, adding layers of mystery and intrigue.

Coming-of-Age Narratives: 16. "The Raven Cycle" Series by Maggie Stiefvater (2012-2016): - Tarot Card Symbolism: Tarot cards, especially "The Magician," play a significant role in the character development and coming-of-age themes of the series. - Personal Growth: The use of tarot reflects the characters' journeys of self-discovery, empowerment, and understanding their places in the world.
Philosophical Exploration: 17. "The Castle of Crossed Destinies" by Italo Calvino (1969): - Silent Characters: In this experimental novel, characters communicate solely through laying out tarot cards to tell their stories. The tarot becomes a visual language, and the narrative explores the interconnectedness of stories and destiny. - Symbolic Interpretation: The novel delves into the nature of narrative, choice, and fate through the lens of tarot symbolism.
Memoir and Autobiography: 18. "M Train" by Patti Smith (2015): - Personal Reflections: In her memoir, Patti Smith reflects on her life, travels, and creative process. Tarot cards appear as a recurring motif, offering glimpses into the author's introspective and spiritual moments. - Intuitive Guidance: The author uses tarot as a tool for personal reflection and guidance, highlighting its role in her creative and spiritual journey.
Literary Criticism: 19. "Tarot as a Way of Life: A Jungian Approach to the Tarot" by Karen Hamaker-Zondag (2001): - Psychological Exploration: This non-fiction work explores tarot from a Jungian perspective, delving into the archetypal and symbolic dimensions of the cards. - Integration with Jungian Psychology: The author uses tarot as a means to explore the collective unconscious and the psychological aspects of the human experience.
Tarot cards continue to be a rich source of inspiration for authors across diverse genres. Whether as a narrative device, a symbolic tool, or a means of philosophical exploration, tarot's presence in literature enhances storytelling by tapping into the mystical, psychological, and symbolic facets of the human condition. As authors weave these archetypal cards into their narratives, readers are invited to explore realms of meaning, mystery, and self-discovery.

I had a hard time looking for credible step-by-step guide on processing OEC. So I put together this simple guide and I hope it helps. Please note that I am still working on my OEC and this is a work-in-progress ⚠️👷‍♀️⚠️. Meaning I will update this post until I finally get my OEC and fly to Canada.
A little background information about me: I have a Canadian employer who processed all my papers including Work Visa, LMIA, and up until submission to POLO for verification. The following steps are for Overseas Employment Certificate (OEC) processing specifically for Direct Hires. I am no expert, all these are based on my own research and experience. This is also my first time doing all these and working abroad. Here it goes:
[1] Create an account here: https://onlineservices.dmw.gov.ph/OnlineServices/Public/CreateAccount.aspx. A temporary password will be sent to your email. Once your account is ready, log in by clicking Let's Go button. Enter your e-mail and password.
[2] On the Dashboard, attach a passport size (4.5 cm x 3.5 cm) profile picture and upload a scanned copy or a picture of the info page of your passport.

ℹ️ If it throws you an error or you don't see a preview of what you've uploaded, your file probably isn't allowed. They either accept JPG/JPEG or PDF only. They also have file size limit. Please double check before uploading anything. This applies to any file you'll be uploading on this website.

[3] On the left side, click My Profile. Setup as much as you can including your Passport under Identifications. Do not upload anything yet under My Documents, this will have to be updated once your status is FOR APPOINTMENT, more of this later (see step 8).
[4] On the right side, you'll see a section called My Links. Click Direct Hire Application.
[5] On the left side under Tools section, click My Application.

ℹ️ This is only accessible Mondays to Fridays 8am to 5pm (Philippine Standard Time)

[6] Upload all required documents (this is Phase 1):

• Passport - Upload the information page
• Visa
• Employment Contract - This has to be verified by POLO, a picture will do. But on your POEA appointment date you have to bring the original copy. Meaning your employer has to mail it to you. The last page of my contract has a Verified stamp of Migrant Workers Office, Philippine Consulate General, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
• Company Profile, Business License / Commercial Registration of the employer - This is part of POLO Verification requirement. Ask your employer to send these documents to you as well. I also included a screenshot of our company website. I read somewhere that you can also use your employer's LinkedIn page.
• Additional country-specific requirements - In my case, I uploaded the approved LMIA
• Additional documents to support job application - I uploaded my resume
• Employer's passport / ID
• Copy of Diploma / ToR / CoE and other certificates - I uploaded a single PDF file for my Diploma and Transcript of Records. I submitted the original copy given to me after graduation. No authentication by a lawyer done and it was accepted and got approved.
• MWO Endorsement Letter - This is the letter of Exemption from Ban on Direct Hiring also with Migrant Workers Office, Philippine Consulate General, Vancouver, BC, Canada stamp.

ℹ️ Sworn statement on how the worker secured employment - this is listed on the things to submit during Phase 1 but it's not required. I didn't submit one and I was able to proceed to the next steps. My application was approved later on.

[7] Once all documents listed in step 6 are submitted, you need to wait until your application status is FOR APPROVAL. At this point you'll receive an email basically instructing you to prepare the Phase 2 requirements:

• Pre-Employment Orientation Seminar (PEOS) - Create an account here: https://peos.dmw.gov.ph/. Read all modules and take all quizzes at the end of each module. Save and print a copy of your PEOS certificate.
• Medical Certificate - get it from DOH Accredited Medical Clinics, see accredited clinics here: https://hfsrb.doh.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/List-of-Accredited-Medical-Facilities-for-Overseas-Workers-and-Seafarers-as-of-August-15-2022.pdf Ask if they give discounts for OFWs.

ℹ️ Workers bound for Canada, New Zealand, and Australia are exempted from submitting Medical Certificates (just upload a blank page instead).
ℹ️ Medical Certificate is only valid for 3 months. If you are confident about your application you can get it as soon as you submitted Phase 1 requirements. I actually did mine only to learn later that Canada-bound workers are exempted (which makes sense since Medical Exam is required in processing VISA). To give you an idea, you will undergo hearing exam, visual exam, radiology, laboratory (including urinalysis and fecal analysis, Hepatitis B surface antigen test or HBsAg test, HIV test, STD test, pregnancy test), psychological evaluation (personality test, intelligence test, autobiography and intake interview), and physical exam.

• Pre-Departure Orientation Seminar (PDOS) - Walk-in PDOS at OWWA 2nd Floor DMW Bldg., Mandaluyong City
  • Contact: (02) 8720-4595
  • Regular Schedule: Monday to Thursday only
  • Registration: 8am (They can only accommodate 48 pax per session, you would want to be there early).
  • Time: 9am to 11am (2 hours long) – Europe, US Territories, Asia & Pacific, Middle East and Africa (Previously they conduct PDOS per country of deployment, but these days they host a "one-size-fits-all" seminar for Direct Hires).
  • Reminder: Come on time. Late comers are not allowed and not given PDOS certificates. OWWA PDOS is free of charge. Wear appropriate attire (No sleeveless, shorts, and slippers). They have a cafeteria inside POEA. You can eat there before the seminar because there's no break in between the 2-hour long seminar.

ℹ️ Bring the following when you attend PDOS: photocopy of your passport, printed registration form (Go to Direct Hire Application > Tools > Print Registration), and your POLO verified employment contract (They won't take this, they will only check and review it).
ℹ️ This is different from PDOS conducted by Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO)'s PDOS. I made a mistake of booking an appointment with them, they didn't entertain me
ℹ️ I tried getting the online PDOS but seems like that isn't available or offered anymore.
ℹ️ Included in PDOS are orientation for SSS, PAGIBIG, PhilHealth, and COMELEC. I recommend to free up your afternoon so you can update all these in POEA Ortigas. It's so convenient since they have all these sectors in one place.
For both SSS and PAGIBIG, they accept advance payments so you don't have to worry about paying when you're abroad. Another convenient way of paying your contributions is through GCash. You may avail PAGIBIG's ID, but it is only offered Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays only. They can only accommodate 50 pax per day. If you want one, come in early.
For PhilHealth, we are required to pay our premiums and that is 5% of our salary written in our employment contract. It's a huge amount! I'm surprised the person in charge for PhilHealth Orientation in PDOS even said that we don't have to pay it, no one will chase us anyway. The only problem is you can't avail of it's benefits.
For COMELEC, there's an upcoming elections next year (April 13 to May 12, 2025). I was able to update my information and register for the planned online voting. You just need to present your passport and fill up their form, then they will take your biometrics.

• Certificate of Insurance - Print your policy confirmation. The following benefits should at least be covered by any LIFE INSURANCE company: repatriation of mortal remains in case of death and repatriation upon termination of employment.

[8] Once your application status is FOR APPOINTMENT, upload all Phase 2 requirements (listed in step 7) in Home > My Documents.

ℹ️ Again, if you get an error or you don't see a preview of what you've uploaded, your file probably isn't allowed. They either accept JPG/JPEG or PDF only. They also have file size limit. Please double check before uploading anything. This applies to any document you'll be uploading on this website.

[9] Go to your scheduled POEA Appointment. Bring the original copy and 2 extra copies of all your Phase 1 (see step 6) and Phase 2 (see step 7) requirements. Also bring a printed copy of your POEA appointment.
[10] WIP, I will update this later. I am still on Step 7 myself 😅
To give you an idea of the overall TIMELINE for processing OEC, here's my journey so far:

• March 8 - We picked up our passports after VISA stamping from VFS Global Makati
• March 20 - POLO Vancouver received the complete requirements for employment verification from my employer
• April 26 - All our documents are verified by POLO
• April 30 - My employer picked up all verified documents from POLO Vancouver office
• May 2 - I did my medical exam and accomplished PEOS
• May 3 - My employer mailed all original documents to me, they also sent me a photographed copy of all the documents so I can upload it to DMW online services. I was able to submit all Phase 1 requirements same day.
• May 6 - I picked up my Medical Certificate with "FIT to work" results
• May 6 - I received the original POLO verified documents (it was mailed to me by my employer through DHL express)
• May 6 - My application status became: assigned to POEA evaluator
• May 7 - My application status became: FOR APPROVAL, subject for Clearance
• May 9 - I attended PDOS at OWWA Ortigas and got my PDOS certificate.
• May 17 - My application was approved. I am still not uploading my Phase 2 (see step 7) requirements since the instructions said to only upload when the status is FOR APPOINTMENT. I'll check back following week.
• May 18 - Waiting... They said the status online will be updated in 2-3 days. Then I can upload my Phase 2 documents. Afterwards another wait time of 2-3 days, then they will issue an appointment date to submit all original hard copies of the requirements. I will update this post again later ⚠️👷‍♀️⚠️

Other notes:

• If your employer has 5+ Filipino employees already, they'll need to get an agency to process your papers.
• If your spouse is coming with you on an Open Work Permit, they don't need to get PDOS or OEC. They need to present a copy of your OEC to Immigration Officer. This information is from a Direct Hire department employee.

I had a hard time looking for credible step-by-step guide on processing OEC. So I put together this simple guide and I hope it helps. Please note that I am still working on my OEC and this is a work-in-progress ⚠️👷‍♀️⚠️. Meaning I will update this post until I finally get my OEC and fly to Canada.
A little background information about me: I have a Canadian employer who processed all my papers including Work Visa, LMIA, and up until submission to POLO for verification. The following steps are for Overseas Employment Certificate (OEC) processing specifically for Direct Hires. I am no expert, all these are based on my own research and experience. This is also my first time doing all these and working abroad. Here it goes:
[1] Create an account here: https://onlineservices.dmw.gov.ph/OnlineServices/Public/CreateAccount.aspx. A temporary password will be sent to your email. Once your account is ready, log in by clicking Let's Go button. Enter your e-mail and password.
[2] On the Dashboard, attach a passport size (4.5 cm x 3.5 cm) profile picture and upload a scanned copy or a picture of the info page of your passport.

ℹ️ If it throws you an error or you don't see a preview of what you've uploaded, your file probably isn't allowed. They either accept JPG/JPEG or PDF only. They also have file size limit. Please double check before uploading anything. This applies to any file you'll be uploading on this website.

[3] On the left side, click My Profile. Setup as much as you can including your Passport under Identifications. Do not upload anything yet under My Documents, this will have to be updated once your status is FOR APPOINTMENT, more of this later (see step 8).
[4] On the right side, you'll see a section called My Links. Click Direct Hire Application.
[5] On the left side under Tools section, click My Application.

ℹ️ This is only accessible Mondays to Fridays 8am to 5pm (Philippine Standard Time)

[6] Upload all required documents (this is Phase 1):

• Passport - Upload the information page
• Visa
• Employment Contract - This has to be verified by POLO, a picture will do. But on your POEA appointment date you have to bring the original copy. Meaning your employer has to mail it to you. The last page of my contract has a Verified stamp of Migrant Workers Office, Philippine Consulate General, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
• Company Profile, Business License / Commercial Registration of the employer - This is part of POLO Verification requirement. Ask your employer to send these documents to you as well. I also included a screenshot of our company website. I read somewhere that you can also use your employer's LinkedIn page.
• Additional country-specific requirements - In my case, I uploaded the approved LMIA
• Additional documents to support job application - I uploaded my resume
• Employer's passport / ID
• Copy of Diploma / ToR / CoE and other certificates - I uploaded a single PDF file for my Diploma and Transcript of Records. I submitted the original copy given to me after graduation. No authentication by a lawyer done and it was accepted and got approved.
• MWO Endorsement Letter - This is the letter of Exemption from Ban on Direct Hiring also with Migrant Workers Office, Philippine Consulate General, Vancouver, BC, Canada stamp.

ℹ️ Sworn statement on how the worker secured employment - this is listed on the things to submit during Phase 1 but it's not required. I didn't submit one and I was able to proceed to the next steps. My application was approved later on.

[7] Once all documents listed in step 6 are submitted, you need to wait until your application status is FOR APPROVAL. At this point you'll receive an email basically instructing you to prepare the Phase 2 requirements:

• Pre-Employment Orientation Seminar (PEOS) - Create an account here: https://peos.dmw.gov.ph/. Read all modules and take all quizzes at the end of each module. Save and print a copy of your PEOS certificate.
• Medical Certificate - get it from DOH Accredited Medical Clinics, see accredited clinics here: https://hfsrb.doh.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/List-of-Accredited-Medical-Facilities-for-Overseas-Workers-and-Seafarers-as-of-August-15-2022.pdf Ask if they give discounts for OFWs.

ℹ️ Workers bound for Canada, New Zealand, and Australia are exempted from submitting Medical Certificates (just upload a blank page instead).
ℹ️ Medical Certificate is only valid for 3 months. If you are confident about your application you can get it as soon as you submitted Phase 1 requirements. I actually did mine only to learn later that Canada-bound workers are exempted (which makes sense since Medical Exam is required in processing VISA). To give you an idea, you will undergo hearing exam, visual exam, radiology, laboratory (including urinalysis and fecal analysis, Hepatitis B surface antigen test or HBsAg test, HIV test, STD test, pregnancy test), psychological evaluation (personality test, intelligence test, autobiography and intake interview), and physical exam.

• Pre-Departure Orientation Seminar (PDOS) - Walk-in PDOS at OWWA 2nd Floor DMW Bldg., Mandaluyong City
  • Contact: (02) 8720-4595
  • Regular Schedule: Monday to Thursday only
  • Registration: 8am (They can only accommodate 48 pax per session, you would want to be there early).
  • Time: 9am to 11am (2 hours long) – Europe, US Territories, Asia & Pacific, Middle East and Africa (Previously they conduct PDOS per country of deployment, but these days they host a "one-size-fits-all" seminar for Direct Hires).
  • Reminder: Come on time. Late comers are not allowed and not given PDOS certificates. OWWA PDOS is free of charge. Wear appropriate attire (No sleeveless, shorts, and slippers). They have a cafeteria inside POEA. You can eat there before the seminar because there's no break in between the 2-hour long seminar.

ℹ️ Bring the following when you attend PDOS: photocopy of your passport, printed registration form (Go to Direct Hire Application > Tools > Print Registration), and your POLO verified employment contract (They won't take this, they will only check and review it).
ℹ️ This is different from PDOS conducted by Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO)'s PDOS. I made a mistake of booking an appointment with them, they didn't entertain me
ℹ️ I tried getting the online PDOS but seems like that isn't available or offered anymore.
ℹ️ Included in PDOS are orientation for SSS, PAGIBIG, PhilHealth, and COMELEC. I recommend to free up your afternoon so you can update all these in POEA Ortigas. It's so convenient since they have all these sectors in one place.
For both SSS and PAGIBIG, they accept advance payments so you don't have to worry about paying when you're abroad. Another convenient way of paying your contributions is through GCash. You may avail PAGIBIG's ID, but it is only offered Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays only. They can only accommodate 50 pax per day. If you want one, come in early.
For PhilHealth, we are required to pay our premiums and that is 5% of our salary written in our employment contract. It's a huge amount! I'm surprised the person in charge for PhilHealth Orientation in PDOS even said that we don't have to pay it, no one will chase us anyway. The only problem is you can't avail of it's benefits.
For COMELEC, there's an upcoming elections next year (April 13 to May 12, 2025). I was able to update my information and register for the planned online voting. You just need to present your passport and fill up their form, then they will take your biometrics.

• Certificate of Insurance - Print your policy confirmation. The following benefits should at least be covered by any LIFE INSURANCE company: repatriation of mortal remains in case of death and repatriation upon termination of employment.

[8] Once your application status is FOR APPOINTMENT, upload all Phase 2 requirements (listed in step 7) in Home > My Documents.

ℹ️ Again, if you get an error or you don't see a preview of what you've uploaded, your file probably isn't allowed. They either accept JPG/JPEG or PDF only. They also have file size limit. Please double check before uploading anything. This applies to any document you'll be uploading on this website.

[9] Go to your scheduled POEA Appointment. Bring the original copy and 2 extra copies of all your Phase 1 (see step 6) and Phase 2 (see step 7) requirements. Also bring a printed copy of your POEA appointment.
[10] WIP, I will update this later. I am still on Step 7 myself 😅
To give you an idea of the overall TIMELINE for processing OEC, here's my journey so far:

• March 8 - We picked up our passports after VISA stamping from VFS Global Makati
• March 20 - POLO Vancouver received the complete requirements for employment verification from my employer
• April 26 - All our documents are verified by POLO
• April 30 - My employer picked up all verified documents from POLO Vancouver office
• May 2 - I did my medical exam and accomplished PEOS
• May 3 - My employer mailed all original documents to me, they also sent me a photographed copy of all the documents so I can upload it to DMW online services. I was able to submit all Phase 1 requirements same day.
• May 6 - I picked up my Medical Certificate with "FIT to work" results
• May 6 - I received the original POLO verified documents (it was mailed to me by my employer through DHL express)
• May 6 - My application status became: assigned to POEA evaluator
• May 7 - My application status became: FOR APPROVAL, subject for Clearance
• May 9 - I attended PDOS at OWWA Ortigas and got my PDOS certificate.
• May 17 - My application was approved. I am still not uploading my Phase 2 (see step 7) requirements since the instructions said to only upload when the status is FOR APPOINTMENT. I'll check back following week.
• May 18 - Waiting... They said the status online will be updated in 2-3 days. Then I can upload my Phase 2 documents. Afterwards another wait time of 2-3 days, then they will issue an appointment date to submit all original hard copies of the requirements. I will update this post again later ⚠️👷‍♀️⚠️

Other notes:

• If your employer has 5+ Filipino employees already, they'll need to get an agency to process your papers.
• If your spouse is coming with you on an Open Work Permit, they don't need to get PDOS or OEC. They need to present a copy of your OEC to Immigration Officer. This information is from a Direct Hire department employee.

Where the fuck do you even begin when you don't ever open up? Especially on a public sounding board to complete strangers?
Uh, before you read this, just be aware it may not be the most chronological piece of autobiography in existence: I have a bad habit of jumping around. But... by the end of it, I do really hope that you'll be able to understand where I'm coming from, and maybe, just maybe, have some advice to share. I do appreicate whomever takes the time to read it... It will be kinda long.
... Right, so, I've just... always had anger problems. Ever since I was a little kid, I would be happy in one moment and then one tiny little thing would go wrong (from my perspective, anyhow) and I would fly off the handle, screaming and throwing things. I went thorugh elementary, middle, and high school as one of the weird kids; though, to be perfectly honest, this never really bothered me all that much. I am weird, someone that doesn't fit into the fold, and I accepted that. But what it meant was that most of the kids through school either avoided me entirely or just made fun of me (which, this also doesn't bother me all that much. I was so off in my own world at that age that it never registered as something I was being made fun of, and I would often just agree and laugh with them or ignore it entirely because I felt it didn't apply.)
That being said, I've also always had a violent streak when my rage starts to boil over. Take for instance this one time in middle school art class when the only kid that would sit with me (who just so happened to be one of the most annoying kids in our grade) takes one of those wooden rulers with the metal straightedge imbedded into it and wacks the metal off the back of my hand when I'm just absorbed in whatever art project we were working on. I stopped, looked up at him, and said, "Please don't do that again." figuring that it was the end of it. Not even 5 seconds later he wacks the damn thing against the back of my hand again, with this huge shit-eating grin on his face. I say, "Don't do that again." and resume my drawing. It had to be like five minutes that went by at this point, because at first I was expecting him to just wap me again within 10 seconds. When he didn't, I just kinda forgot about it and once again got all hyper focused into whatever I was drawing, but yet again he raps that damn metal straightedge against my hand, the hardest yet. I fucking snapped. Completely fucking silently, I stood up and walked around the desk. He also stands up with that inane shiteating grin wrapped ear to ear, laughing it off as if I hadn't just told him twice to knock it the fuck off. He starts backing up away from me and I can just feel this darkness leaking into my body, my fists clenched and my face screwed up into a grimace. I have no idea how many people stopped to watch at this point. The two of us always sat as close to the door as we could and the other kids quite literally as far away form us as they could, so there was plenty of time as I was walking him backwards for them to stop and watch. I have no idea what he was saying, my ears were just ringing with pure fucking rage. Maybe something to the effect of, "C'mon, man it was just a joke, I won't do it again." But I was not in control of my full faculties. Eventually, we walked all the way to the teachers desk and he stopped walking just before he touched the wall of the classroom. Fists still clenched, brows still furrowed, heart pounding harder than it ever had in my life, I reached my right hand out and wrapped it around his throat, and I actually fuck you not I lifted him straight over my head with one arm (at the time, we were roughly the same height and weight, which was aroound 5'6" and 165 lbs). I stared at him above me for a couple seconds as he faffed about trying to take my hand off his throat, and I considered what I would do. Standing so close to the teacher's desk, I took one look at it and it was sealed in my mind: I slammed the back of the bastard's head into the edge of the teacher's desk. The classroom fell silent. The teacher, usually very well composed shakily told me through tears to go to the principal's office. I took one look down at this dude's limp body and shrugged, and started storming out of the classroom. My heart still pounding, my head still spinning, my body still wanting to fucking tear this faggot ass bastard to fucking pieces, I turned at the door and started screaming bloody goddamn murder at the entire fucking classroom, of which the words are lost to my memory. Definitely something to the effect of how I hated each and every single person in that classroom. Surprisingly, the kid lived. I honest to God sometimes wish he hadn't; the rage is still beating in my heart years later. And we're on good terms now! Years later, I asked him for clarification if I had grabbed him by the throat or the shirt, and he told me it was the shirt; but I so distinctly remembered it being the throat I just dismissed him. After all, if I had him by the shirt, how could I possibly have slammed the back of his head into the desk? Well, years after that when I started working at the local McDonald's, I was telling the story to one of the coworkers and from the other side of the sandwich line one of the girls piped up that she remembered that moment very well, too: That it was by the throat that i had him, and that she had been terrified of me ever since. Understandable, I suppose.
But, middle school doesn't last forever. Life moves on, and you grow older in it (even if you aren't growing up.) Through high school, I honestly thought I had calmed down one hell of a lot, as violent outbursts didn't happen. There may have been once that kids were making fun of me in volleyball for not being able to play it very well (they always put me on the teams with the athletic kids...) so I started to just play like a complete and total dipshit, and was actually playing better than if I had been locked in. They told me to stop playing like a dumbass and I flew off the handle at them like, "Which is it? Play the fucking game or play like a fucking dumbass?" and stormed off to the principal's office because I knew I was in trouble.
At this same McDonald's, there was a time when I was closing, right? The teenagers that were supposed to be closing with us were faffing about on their fuckin phones all night, and usually that's kinda okay because it was slow as fuck towards the end of the night. However, this day there was a significant uptick in orders all of a sudden and there was fucking nobody back in the kitchen with me; they were all just fucking around on their phones in the front of the store. I hollered from the bun toaster, "Yo, where is my kitchen?!" loud enough for every employee in the store to hear me and the manager kinda just goes, "That was uncalled for!!" This made me go fucking insane. Fucking excuse me, bitch? Your fucking employees are fucking around on their phones when we have 8 fucking orders on screen with more people in the drive thru waiting to order? What the flying fuck are your employees doing when I'm the only fucking person working? set your fucking employees right! (Bear in mind, I'm screaming this shit at the top of my lungs now, guarunteed to be heard by just about every car in that drive thru. I am very loud when I get mad.) She's screaming something back at me this entire time that kinda just flies completely under my radar because I'm in the right and I know I am (from my perspective) and she ends up screaming just go the fuck home and don't even clock out. Everyone in the store is staring at this fight unfold and when we fell silent after that, all you could hear was the beep of the fryer letting you know to pull up the fries. Storming through, I pulled them out of the fryer (because no-one else was touching it) and she screamed "DON'T EVEN FUCKING THINK ABOUT IT" so I dropped the burning basket of fries right back in to the fryer and stormed out. The next shift I was scheduled to work, I came in and not one single person said a word about that explosion. Not the GM, not the manager I screamed at, not a single one of the employees working that night. But everyone was in their place where they were supposed to be now, doing their fucking job.
And really, there just have been moments like that my entire life. Usually I'm pretty quiet, hold my words and listen to people before making any sort of direct like... statements on anything. If someone asks me a question, I try my darndest to answer to the best of my ability. But like I say, there are just times when I lose it. I could actually go on about one more rage fit story at that restaurant, but to be perfectly honest, I don't really think I need to at this point. Basically, I got fired from that McD for another rage fit I threw over some slightly bullshit reason and I started flinging shit everywhere in the breakroom. Little did I know, the owner of the store was in the next fucking room having a district meeting. They heard everything. The GM comes down the stairs screaming, "What the hell is going on down here?!" and when she saw that I was too fucking pissed to talk straight she sent me home and told me do not come back until we call. I called about a week later and she said that even though she wanted to keep me because I did a damn good job, the owner said that they can't have a loose cannon in the store. Which is completely understandable.
But now, I'm 23. I've been in a 2 year long relationship with the love of my life, and we have a beautiful son who's already a year old (I know, it went kinda fast lol). We moved state to be closer to her family and because our son will have better opportunities in this state. But I still have problems. She has her own anxieties and traumas. Sometimes, we just disagree on things, and with my insane desire to be right all the time, we butt heads a lot. I've snapped more times than I care to count, more often than not over things that if I just stepped down off my fuckin high horse, would be smoothed over with literally no fuckin problems. But then, I would have to get into the fact that she's just as argumentative as I can be sometimes, and more often than not I'm simply not able to disengage and calm down before I fly off the handle. Sometimes if I try to walk out the door, I'm threatened to be kicked out for good (this is a defense mechanism she uses, and she doesn't really even know why) and I find myself unable to fuckin move or speak lest I burst and she just continues to push. I blow up and start screaming bloody murder at her, just wanting to calm down or be heard or left alone or SOMETHING besides arguing like we do. After we both calm down, we have a heartfelt talk about it and our perspectives and what led to the emotions, and I personally believe that we have become so much better at communication with each other. But even so, there are still times when we just get... Grrrrr with each other. I don't want this nasty shit in my heart any more. It's a deep, dark well of rage and it threatens to burst more and more every day. I find myself getting shorter and shorter fused with people. We've lived in this state for a little over a year now, and when we moved here this fucking place we moved to wouldn't allow you to make more than a certain amount of income amongst the household so I was without a job for a year because we had nowhere else to go if we were kicked out. And I had landed a damn good job at the time I had to quit it. So we moved houses in this town, and I find myself once again working at McD. The other week, a similar situation happened like what with the former one, where someone I was supposed to be working with started doing something completely different when we had orders flooding in. I started getting all in a huff and I turned to my manager, who asked me, "Where's your cabinet person?" and I shrugged and said, "This is the exact kind of bullshit that made me explode at the former McDonald's." So I just kept my head down and kept assembling sandwiches until I couldn't stand it anymore and I screamed the poor kid's name. He comes around the corner like, "What?" with a stupid look on his face and I just shake my head and put down more patties for burgers and more chicken nuggets and more McChicken patties, put in my buns for the sandwiches. He comes over and slowly gets his gloves on, slowly walks over and kinda just grabs a nugget box. He asks, "How many more do I need?" and I just kinda grumpily mumble, "Look at the fucking screen, dumbass." I keep whipping together sandwich after sandwich and this fuckin idiot takes his sweet ass time putting ~60 nuggets together, to the point where I finsih my sandwiches and push him out of th way and quickly finish up the nugget boxes. He says, "Okay, man, jeez, just calm down." I take one fucking look at him, and say, "I swear to fucking God, do not fucking start with me. Get the fuck out of my face, and fucking leave." He turns to manager and asks if he can go home, to which she just sort of weakly nods. The night finsihed relatively fine after that.
And just this last Thursday, my girlfriend takes a trip to McDon for the lil' man a happy meal. She texts me out of nowhere and says that one of my coworkers told her that I was flirting with one of the other employees. I never have flirted with these dumb bitches, I do not want to, I do not like them; I HAVE an AMAZING girlfriend that supports me more than anyone every has and who daily tells me to improve myself and who daily seeks to help me with my anger problems. These other fish can go take a fucking hike to Hell and back for all I care. So instantly, I get this image in mind of a particular person who might do something like that and I almost fucking lost it. My girlfriend still hasn't told me, because I've had some fantasies about seriously fucking this kid up for trying to break us apart. AND I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHO IT WAS! I've just been thinking on confronting and being all like, "Don't you ever, EVER talk to my family again. If you so much as take her fucking order I will fucking murder you." But because I don't know who it is, I just... haven't said a word to anyone except my lady about it. (.... and now, everyone that reads this far into a TL;DR.)
And I just... don't know what the hell to do about it. I walk everywhere I go, so with the move to this state and the move of houses, trying to find the time to get over to the therapy place I'm looking at that not only accepts my insurance but also has great reviews, especially for anger management and the like, has been difficult: They require an in-person, walk-in visit before you can even start regular appoinments with them. And even though my girlfriend does the most she can to help me, there are times when enough is enough, even for her. I don't want to lose my family. I don't want to hurt them if I fly off the handle for some stupid batshit insane reason. I don't want to alienate them; I want them to know I love them. It's not like they don't know, it's just that I can be scary sometimes. And I hate it. Even so, that being said, we have been taking steps as a couple to mitigate our misunderstandings of each other, and to more quickly discuss what it is that went wrong and how to better handle it the next time something similar comes up. It's been a slow process to get to this point, and I don't know if that's normal. Sometimes she acts like I should already be a hell of a lot better... but then, I'll explain my side of the story and the insecurities I was feeling that led me to burst out, and she's a little more understanding. Though it's always the case that I need to dial my reaction back from 11 to about like 1.
.... This is definitely rambly. If.. you can make any sense of this, as jumpy as it is, thank you for understanding, sincerely from the absolute bottom of my soul. Please, i just... want to be a better person.

Hello hello,
I finished my finals for Uni last week and would like to fill my newly found free time with some hobbies and forming new friendships.
As for a few tidbits about me: I love music; most types really, aside from the more obscure stuff out there such as metal and all variations of it. I also enjoy cooking and trying out new cuisines (I’m pretty big on learning about new cultures and trying out food from said cultures). Photography is a hobby that I like to dabble in during my free time —and if we’re being honest— I create free time whenever I can to snap a photo, whether that be of food, animals, landscapes, architecture, or just something I find pretty. Oh, and another interest, this one even more generic than the rest, would be that I like gaming even though I’m absolute 💩 at it.
I don’t want to make this an autobiography so I’ll leave it at that. Hope that I can meet some cool, new people out there :)

Okay - I’m about 300 pages from finishing book 7 of the Dark Tower. I started with the Gunslinger and went straight through. I found this post from 7 years ago about the best order to read the Dark Tower.
My question - Is this reading order still relevant? Since I started with the Dark Tower series first, I’m just going to go down the list and skip the ones I’ve read.
Here is the post. Originally by u/Unifiedshoe:
Copied this from a blog awhile ago. As soon as I finish the current Expanse book I'm diving in.
Here goes:
The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (revised edition) -- I still think starting with the first book is the only thing that makes sense.
Salem's Lot -- This 1975 novel is crucial to Wolves of the Calla. In a way, you get everything you need to know about Salem's Lot from reading Wolves of the Calla, but I think it nevertheless makes sense to read it. Plus, great novel.
"The Dark Man" -- This 1969 poem is King's earliest writing about the figure who will eventually become (arguably) the most important villain in the Dark Tower series. It's going to be easiest to find via the 2013 book The Dark Man, which reprinted the poem with copious illustrations. Personally, I don't think it's much of a poem, and I don't think you'll miss out on much of anything if you skip it. But if you can find it easily, it's worth the handful of minutes it will take you to read it.
The Stand -- A 1978 novel (revised and considerably expanded in 1990) about a plague that wipes out most of the world's population. Randall Flagg, the "Dark Man" himself, is the bad guy here, and he will go on to be a massively significant figure in the series. For the purposes of this list, I'd say the 1990 edition is definitely the one to read.
"The Mist" -- Most easily found within King's 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, "The Mist" tells the story of a military experiment gone wrong. It has no direct relevance to the Tower series, but there is a scene in Book VII that seems related. Plus, great novella.
The Talisman -- As mentioned earlier, this novel is the one to which Black House is a sequel. Apart from that, there are a great many ideas in the novel which can be said to be related to ideas in the Tower series. King and co-author Peter Straub do not make those connections explicit, which is why I omitted this novel from my abbreviated list of Tower essentials; but it MUST appear on any expanded list.
The Eyes of the Dragon -- First published in 1984 as a limited edition and published in revised form as a mass-market hardback in 1987, this fantasy novel serves well as a dessert to the meal that is The Talisman. It shares a villain with one of the other novels on this list; or, technically, with multiple novels on this list.
It -- This 1986 epic is not only a great novel, but it's also got some major thematic relevance to the Tower series (and to Song of Susannah particularly, and maybe with Book VII, although that is a matter of some debate).
"The Reploids" -- This 1988 short story has never been collected in one of King's books, but you can probably still find a cheap copy of The Skin Trade, the anthology in which it appeared. It's by no means a crucial story, but it does contain an early version of a concept that is important to Song of Susannah. It was published after The Drawing of the Three, but I think you can slot it in right here pretty well.
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three -- You will likely have noticed that I've inserted quite a large number of other books between The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three. This list, remember, is for people who wish to dig a little deeper, and it's my opinion that if you put a big gap between The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, it simulates the five-year gap that existed between the publication of the two novels. Time gaps like that are useful for this series; they serve a purpose. You can read the series in either manner, of course; but this is my recommended method.
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
Needful Things -- At the risk of delivering a mild spoiler, let me say now that I realize there are a great many Towerphiles who would balk at my recommendation that you split up Book III and IV. Most readers, I think, are going to want to go straight from one to the next. If you feel that urge strongly enough to get antsy about it, follow that urgre. I won't blame you one bit. However, you need to know this: there was a six-year gap between the publications of those two novels, and trust me when I tell you that I was there for that gap; it was excruciating. So if you want to get a little taste of what that agony was like -- and it's an agony that also has its pleasures -- then stick a few other things between III and IV. You might find that it lends the Tower-related content of those books an added weight. (By the way, I did not have Needful Things on the version of this list that I compiled in 2012, but I've since decided that it belongs, in large part to to the work of a commenter named Dan. [Hi, Dan!] There are no direct connections to the Tower series, but the novel does deal in a direct way with a few of the big-picture concepts that King's entire mythos is built upon.)
Insomnia
Rose Madder -- This 1995 novel is partially set in Mid-World, so it definitely counts. It's one of my least favorite King novels, though. Desperation and The Regulators -- This tag-team of mirror-image novels was released on the same day in 1996, with the latter being billed as a Richard Bachman novel. For that reason, I prefer to read Desperation first; but a few people have told me that they passionately feel the stories work better if you read The Regulators first. I'm sticking with my way, but they might be onto something. The Tower content is considerable, if mostly indirect; some of the ideas introduced here pop up again later (in "The Little Sisters of Eluria," for example).
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass -- The manner in which this one wraps up lends itself somewhat to another lengthy break. In the real world, it would -- with the exception of "Eluria" -- be six more years before we got the next book in the series.
"Everything's Eventual" -- As previously mentioned, this short story can be found in the collection of the same name. And while you're there you may as well go ahead and read...
"The Little Sisters of Eluria"
The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole -- As I mentioned previously my current opinion is that this novel should be read as a sort of Book IV-and-a-half. With that in mind, I think it probably makes sense to follow straight on from "Eluria" to Keyhole.
Bag of Bones -- This 1998 novel has minor connections to the Tower series, and if King himself didn't include it on his list of related works, I wouldn't list it on mine. But he does, and the connections are there, however mild; and so here it is. It's a strong novel, either way, so you're unlikely to regret reading it.
Storm of the Century -- This 1999 television miniseries is not directly related to the Tower series (and indeed, King does NOT include it on his list of associated works, so I'm bucking against the Master himself in making my own list). However, if its villain doesn't remind you of other villains within the series, I'll eat my hat. I'll have to buy one first, but I'll buy it, and then I'll eat it.
Hearts In Atlantis -- You could just stick with "Low Men In Yellow Coats," but the final story in the book also has some relevance that you ought to check out. Plus, as I've said, great novel.
On Writing -- it had never occurred to me before now to include this nonfiction book on my list, but I think it's very deserving of inclusion. As I mentioned earlier, King had a life-threatening injury in 1999, and I feel that understanding that incident is crucial to understanding the way he resolves the Tower series. Nowhere will you gain a better understanding of that accident than from On Writing, which is both a great book and probably the closest we will ever get to a King autobiography. So in my opinion, it absolutely belongs on this list.
Black House
From A Buick 8 -- This 2002 novel is similar to Bag of Bones in that if King didn't include it on his list of connected works, I might have omitted it from mine. But there are connections, which I leave you to find for yourself. The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower -- It is my considered opinion that the final three novels in the series should be read in sequence, with no interruptions. They were published that way -- albeit with brief gaps of a few months -- and the prose reads, in my opinion, as that of one long novel.
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger -- For this expanded version of my essentials, I recommend diving from Book VII straight back into the 1982 version of the series' first novel, so as to gain an idea of the differences. Some folks won't care about that sort of thing; I feel certain that you do. TRUST me.
Cell -- This 2006 novel has a lot of Tower-related imagery via a comic book drawn by one of the main characters. (And we again have Dan to thank for bringing these connections back to my attention; I'd apparently forgotten about them after reading the novel a decade ago.) In a way, Cell shows that even after the conclusion of the series, the events of that series are still radiating out through King's multiverse.
"Ur" -- This 2009 short story can be found in King's collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, and is related to the series in a way that is best left for the reader to discover.
11/22/63 -- King has said that this 2011 novel has no connection to the Tower, but I don't believe him. You shouldn't either. And even if you do, this is a great novel that is well worth reading.

The order of books below are from a post I've found from 7 yrs ago. I'd rather not read a book if there is no connection, if the connection is left up for interpretation or if it seems like a reach. Thrilled to start reading from this list, once solidified. What would you remove, add, switch or replace?:

1. The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (revised edition) -- I still think starting with the first book is the only thing that makes sense.
2. Salem's Lot -- This 1975 novel is crucial to Wolves of the Calla. In a way, you get everything you need to know about Salem's Lot from reading Wolves of the Calla, but I think it nevertheless makes sense to read it. Plus, great novel.
3. "The Dark Man" -- This 1969 poem is King's earliest writing about the figure who will eventually become (arguably) the most important villain in the Dark Tower series. It's going to be easiest to find via the 2013 book The Dark Man, which reprinted the poem with copious illustrations. Personally, I don't think it's much of a poem, and I don't think you'll miss out on much of anything if you skip it. But if you can find it easily, it's worth the handful of minutes it will take you to read it.
4. The Stand -- A 1978 novel (revised and considerably expanded in 1990) about a plague that wipes out most of the world's population. Randall Flagg, the "Dark Man" himself, is the bad guy here, and he will go on to be a massively significant figure in the series. For the purposes of this list, I'd say the 1990 edition is definitely the one to read.
5. "The Mist" -- Most easily found within King's 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, "The Mist" tells the story of a military experiment gone wrong. It has no direct relevance to the Tower series, but there is a scene in Book VII that seems related. Plus, great novella.
6. The Talisman -- As mentioned earlier, this novel is the one to which Black House is a sequel. Apart from that, there are a great many ideas in the novel which can be said to be related to ideas in the Tower series. King and co-author Peter Straub do not make those connections explicit, which is why I omitted this novel from my abbreviated list of Tower essentials; but it MUST appear on any expanded list.
7. The Eyes of the Dragon -- First published in 1984 as a limited edition and published in revised form as a mass-market hardback in 1987, this fantasy novel serves well as a dessert to the meal that is The Talisman. It shares a villain with one of the other novels on this list; or, technically, with multiple novels on this list.
8. It -- This 1986 epic is not only a great novel, but it's also got some major thematic relevance to the Tower series (and to Song of Susannah particularly, and maybe with Book VII, although that is a matter of some debate).
9. "The Reploids" -- This 1988 short story has never been collected in one of King's books, but you can probably still find a cheap copy of The Skin Trade, the anthology in which it appeared. It's by no means a crucial story, but it does contain an early version of a concept that is important to Song of Susannah. It was published after The Drawing of the Three, but I think you can slot it in right here pretty well.
10. The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three -- You will likely have noticed that I've inserted quite a large number of other books between The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three. This list, remember, is for people who wish to dig a little deeper, and it's my opinion that if you put a big gap between The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, it simulates the five-year gap that existed between the publication of the two novels. Time gaps like that are useful for this series; they serve a purpose. You can read the series in either manner, of course; but this is my recommended method.
11. The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
12. Needful Things -- At the risk of delivering a mild spoiler, let me say now that I realize there are a great many Towerphiles who would balk at my recommendation that you split up Book III and IV. Most readers, I think, are going to want to go straight from one to the next. If you feel that urge strongly enough to get antsy about it, follow that urgre. I won't blame you one bit. However, you need to know this: there was a six-year gap between the publications of those two novels, and trust me when I tell you that I was there for that gap; it was excruciating. So if you want to get a little taste of what that agony was like -- and it's an agony that also has its pleasures -- then stick a few other things between III and IV. You might find that it lends the Tower-related content of those books an added weight. (By the way, I did not have Needful Things on the version of this list that I compiled in 2012, but I've since decided that it belongs, in large part to to the work of a commenter named Dan. [Hi, Dan!] There are no direct connections to the Tower series, but the novel does deal in a direct way with a few of the big-picture concepts that King's entire mythos is built upon.)
13. Insomnia
14. Rose Madder -- This 1995 novel is partially set in Mid-World, so it definitely counts. It's one of my least favorite King novels, though. Desperation and The Regulators -- This tag-team of mirror-image novels was released on the same day in 1996, with the latter being billed as a Richard Bachman novel. For that reason, I prefer to read Desperation first; but a few people have told me that they passionately feel the stories work better if you read The Regulators first. I'm sticking with my way, but they might be onto something. The Tower content is considerable, if mostly indirect; some of the ideas introduced here pop up again later (in "The Little Sisters of Eluria," for example).
15. The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass -- The manner in which this one wraps up lends itself somewhat to another lengthy break. In the real world, it would -- with the exception of "Eluria" -- be six more years before we got the next book in the series.
16. "Everything's Eventual" -- As previously mentioned, this short story can be found in the collection of the same name. And while you're there you may as well go ahead and read...
17. "The Little Sisters of Eluria"
18. The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole -- As I mentioned previously my current opinion is that this novel should be read as a sort of Book IV-and-a-half. With that in mind, I think it probably makes sense to follow straight on from "Eluria" to Keyhole.
19. Bag of Bones -- This 1998 novel has minor connections to the Tower series, and if King himself didn't include it on his list of related works, I wouldn't list it on mine. But he does, and the connections are there, however mild; and so here it is. It's a strong novel, either way, so you're unlikely to regret reading it.
20. Storm of the Century -- This 1999 television miniseries is not directly related to the Tower series (and indeed, King does NOT include it on his list of associated works, so I'm bucking against the Master himself in making my own list). However, if its villain doesn't remind you of other villains within the series, I'll eat my hat. I'll have to buy one first, but I'll buy it, and then I'll eat it.
21. Hearts In Atlantis -- You could just stick with "Low Men In Yellow Coats," but the final story in the book also has some relevance that you ought to check out. Plus, as I've said, great novel.
22. On Writing -- it had never occurred to me before now to include this nonfiction book on my list, but I think it's very deserving of inclusion. As I mentioned earlier, King had a life-threatening injury in 1999, and I feel that understanding that incident is crucial to understanding the way he resolves the Tower series. Nowhere will you gain a better understanding of that accident than from On Writing, which is both a great book and probably the closest we will ever get to a King autobiography. So in my opinion, it absolutely belongs on this list.
23. Black House
24. From A Buick 8 -- This 2002 novel is similar to Bag of Bones in that if King didn't include it on his list of connected works, I might have omitted it from mine. But there are connections, which I leave you to find for yourself. The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
25. The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
26. The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower -- It is my considered opinion that the final three novels in the series should be read in sequence, with no interruptions. They were published that way -- albeit with brief gaps of a few months -- and the prose reads, in my opinion, as that of one long novel.
27. The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger -- For this expanded version of my essentials, I recommend diving from Book VII straight back into the 1982 version of the series' first novel, so as to gain an idea of the differences. Some folks won't care about that sort of thing; I feel certain that you do. TRUST me.
28. Cell -- This 2006 novel has a lot of Tower-related imagery via a comic book drawn by one of the main characters. (And we again have Dan to thank for bringing these connections back to my attention; I'd apparently forgotten about them after reading the novel a decade ago.) In a way, Cell shows that even after the conclusion of the series, the events of that series are still radiating out through King's multiverse.
29. "Ur" -- This 2009 short story can be found in King's collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, and is related to the series in a way that is best left for the reader to discover.

1 THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF THE OTAKU
Given the topic of this book we cannot avoid a detailed inquiry into the nature of the otaku. They are, after all, the largest consumers of the beautiful fighting girls. What are the otaku thinking? What do they want and how do they get it? Are we right to speak of a “psychopathology of the otaku”? Or is that a bogus question? Or rather, don’t we know the answer already?
Otaku are immature human beings who have grown up without being able to let go of infantile transitional objects such as anime and monsters. They avoid contact with reality for fear that it will harm them and instead take refuge in a world of fiction. They are afraid of adult relationships, particularly sexual relationships, and find sexual stimulation only in fictional constructs. In psychiatric terms they would be classified as “schizothymic.”
These are a few of the most common stereotypical assumptions about otaku. Of course, being stereotypes does not mean they are necessarily incorrect. They may be accurate but still meaningless. These sorts of interpretations inevitably miss what is truly of interest about the otaku community.
The otaku are a strange and unique community that has come into existence as a result of the interactions between the modern media environment and the adolescent psyche in Japan. To my knowledge, however, sufficient thought has yet to be given to the otaku as a community. In this chapter I consider, sometimes from the perspective of a psychiatrist, and sometimes not, the psychopathology of the otaku.
Of course, when I say the “psychopathology of the otaku,” this does not mean that being an otaku in and of itself is a pathological phenomenon. Like the “psychopathology of adolescence” or the “psychopathology of high-school girls,” it is a provisional designation for the particular psychic disposition that might be imagined to be prevalent in a given group. It is also a convenient way to avoid expressions like psychology or psychic structure. This may be difficult to understand, but to put it in the most rigorous terms possible, I would say that psychopathology as I am using it here refers to the intentionality of “that which mediates the subject.” The problem, in other words, has to do with media.
I do not think that being an otaku in and of itself is a form of sickness, nor do I consider myself an otaku (otaku is not a self-designation in any case). It is from this standpoint that I propose to speak about the psychopathology of the otaku. This involves giving equal consideration to the degree to which the otaku community is well adapted and the degree to which it exhibits pathologies.
First, I want to say a few things about the particular challenges involved in speaking about the otaku. Otaku culture is by all accounts still in a state of immaturity (if one can expect “maturity” from it in the first place). Because it is still coming into being, one runs into fundamental difficulties in trying to view it in its entirety. For this reason, we have only a limited number of ways to discuss it. One way is to establish oneself as an otaku and speak as a complete insider, which is to say in a strategically uncritical manner (this is the stance taken by Okada Toshio). Alternatively, one can choose to take oneself out of the equation altogether and face the otaku with an attitude of revulsion and rejection. These two approaches may seem quite at odds, but in fact they are both versions of self-love and often amount to confessions of otakuphilia. When speaking of the otaku, it is crucial to begin by recognizing that these are only two approaches currently available to us.
But I am trying for a third way. Namely, to become an “otaku of otaku,” that is, an otaku whose love is directed toward otaku culture itself. This is not far from the kind of position that Okada advocates, although he calls himself an otaku of special effects and figurines. As for myself, I suppose I am a fan of special effects and monsters, although I have left my passion for Godzilla behind. (Not because I grew out of it but because Godzilla has regressed). I do not find any moe in most beautiful girl anime. I could not live without manga, but I hardly ever watch anime because I cannot stand the images and voice-overs. Even Miyazaki Hayao’s anime come close to the limit of what I can stand in terms of anime images. Yet despite all that, I remain riveted by the activities of the otaku themselves. For better or for worse, since finishing graduate school, I have been fortunate enough to have several extremely serious otaku among my circle. From an outsider’s perspective I found their activities utterly fascinating. And while I was thrilled to be able to observe them from close-up, I cannot deny that I was also sometimes perplexed by what can only be called their immaturity as members of society. Despite this, I believe I was able to maintain friendly relations with them. They all happened to be psychiatrists, psychiatry being the profession with perhaps the highest proportion of otaku among its members. I spare the reader the details of the endless conversations among the members of a certain psychiatry department during the Evangelion boom of 1997.
So what kind of person am I? At the moment I don’t have a good answer to this question. Psychoanalysis is after all premised on the impossibility of self-analysis (which is why analysts must undergo analysis themselves during their training). So allow me to refrain from useless navel-gazing and describe the contours of this unique community from a psychiatrist’s perspective.
Otaku and Maniacs
Nos that have made clear the limitations, and even the absurdity in some cases, of trying to understand otaku in terms of personality type, we can nonetheless abstract a few characteristics of the otaku. An otaku is

• a person with a strong affinity for fictional contexts.
• a person who makes use of fictionalization as a way to “possess” the object of his or her love.
• a person who inhabits not just two but multiple orientations.
• a person capable of finding sexual objects in fiction itself.

Before I try to explain each of these in turn, there are a few points I need to clarify. First, I defer all value judgments about otaku. Problems of adaption such as “fleeing from reality,” “taking refuge in fiction,” and “lacking common sense” may seem easy to spot in otaku, but they are not essential aspects. When value judgments become mixed up in the description they only create more confusion. If my descriptions are to be of any use at all, it will be because they are free of value judgments.
When describing a given type, it is often easier to grasp if one compares it with another similar type. The closest type to the otaku is surely the maniac.
Although they are still often confused with each other, the otaku and the maniac are clearly different in subtle but important ways. If the two were in fact synonymous, there would be no point in theorizing the meaning for us today of the “psychopathology of the otaku.” This is because the maniac is a universal type, while the otaku is historically specific. Understood as a kind of fetishism, mania has a history that may stretch back to the beginning of civilization.
Even if there are many areas of overlap, let us begin by discussing the differences between the two. To state my conclusion partly at the outset, I believe that today’s otaku derive from a group of maniacs who have reacted to the changes in the media environment by a proliferating set of adaptions. Just as the marsupials on the Australian continent mimicked the specialization of the mammals as a whole, the otaku mimicked the specialization of the class of maniacs within the isolation of the media environment.
The difference between these two communities is made clear through the kinds of objects to which they become attached. The following is a provisional list of the types of object each group might choose:
Otaku Objects:

• Anime, video games (mostly so-called girl games), young adult novels, voice actor idols, special effects, C-class idols, fan magazines (dojinshi), yaoi (see note 19), fighting girls.

Potential Crossover Objects:

• Trains, personal computers, film, manga, B-class idols, science fiction, American comics, the occult, amateur radio, police dramas, plastic models, figurines.

Maniac Objects:

• Philately, bibliomania, audio, cameras, astronomy, birdwatching, insect collecting, all forms of music, and all other forms of collecting.

These classifications are based on my personal impressions rather than any empirical data. So there may well be many exceptions and disagreements. If I were asked whether collectors of “anime figurines” were otaku or maniacs, for example, I would be hard-pressed to come up with a satisfying answer. But I do still believe these classifications accurately reflect the tendencies of each group. And they provide the starting point for the discussion of the difference between the otaku and the maniac that follows.
What strikes us most about these objects is what I call the “difference in level of fictional context.” Here we might think of the “fictional” as an abstraction of reality on the basis of some sort of bias. Of course, it is more complicated than that, but let us assume it is the case for now.
On the basis of this assumption, then, we can rank objects according to “degree of fictionality.” Documentaries based on interviews and primary sources, for example, would have a low level of fictionality. Through techniques such as citation and parody, “fiction” itself can be limitlessly abstracted and further fictionalized. Thus metafiction can be understood as having a higher level of fictionality than fiction. To put it a different way, the more forms of media that mediate the original information, the higher the level of fictionality. This is what we call the “difference in the level of fictional context.”
The term context here, following the work of Gregory Bateson and Edward T. Hall, is used in the general sense of the term, as that which determines the meaning of a given stimulus. It is important to keep in mind here that we cannot assume a straightforward ratio whereby the higher the level of “fictional context” is, the higher the level of fictionality will be. I return to this point again later.
The term maniac referred originally to a kind of person who is obsessed with something that yields no practical advantage. But compared with the otaku, the objects of maniacs can look quite concrete (not practical perhaps, but concrete). Looking back at the list of objects, we can see that those preferred by maniacs, such as audio equipment, stamps, antiques, and insect collections, are certainly for amusement and serve no practical function. But compared with those of the otaku, the objects of the maniac do have a concrete materiality. By concrete materiality I mean simply that one can pick them up in one’s hands and that they can be measured.
Generally speaking, maniacs compete with each other in terms of how effectively their hobbies translate into materiality. Collectors pride themselves on the size of their collections. And of course, this involves speculations about their value and rarity. Audio maniacs want faithful playback of sound with as little noise as possible. For insect collectors, it is not enough merely to know about rare bugs; their reputations as collectors depend on actually owning specimens of them. The unspoken rule of a naive “orientation toward material objects” is still very much in force here.
Otaku are lacking in this orientation toward the material and the practical. They know that the objects of their attachment have no material reality, that their vast knowledge has no use for other people in the world, and that this useless knowledge may even (especially after the Miyazaki Tsutomu incident) be viewed with contempt and suspicion. And knowing all of that, they still enjoy the gam of performing for each other their passion. The expression, “having a strong affinity for fictional contexts” is meant to clarify this sort of difference.
I just used the expression “performing their passion,” which requires a bit more explanation. The passion of the otaku is more performative than that of the maniac. Otaku are in communication with other otaku through code of “passion.” They are certainly not cool or disinterested, but neither do they completely lose themselves when indulging in their passion. This sort of slightly “canted stance toward passion” is very closely related to the essence of the otaku’s “affinity for fictional constructs.” Later we will see how perfectly the expression “X-moe” describes this.
Of course, we should consider the possibility that this has to do with how otaku deal with the society around them. Most of the objects to which otaku find themselves attracted are “embarrassing” in one way or another. They can be very easily ridiculed for their infatuation with anime at an age when most people have moved on. As a defense against this, it is perhaps inevitable that they might want to give the appearance to others that they are “only pretending to be obsessed.”
If we were to borrow a Benjaminian metaphor for what I have said so far, we could say that maniacs are enchanted by the aura of the original object, while the otaku fashion an original aura for their (fictional) reproductions.
The Problem of Possession
The next characteristic of the otaku is the way they go about possessing the objects of their attachment. We know that they enjoy animation. And they like special effects. But unlike stamps or audio systems, these are hard to collect. The fact is, moreover, that not all otaku are collectors in the first place. One might assume that anime fans are all interested in collecting actual cels from their favorite shows, but in fact this is surprisingly rare. Of course, such otaku do exist in fairly significant numbers, but this is not a necessary qualification for otaku identity. Part of this has to do with the fact that cels are not necessarily the material object-form of an anime. This may sound paradoxical, but cels are actually more like a by-product of an anime and occupy the same position as spin-off merchandise. So even if you owned every cel of an anime, this would not mean that you owned the anime itself. So how do the otaku make their objects their own?
Simply put, they do so through fictionalization.
What otaku enjoy is not making fiction into material form. Nor, as is often claimed, do they derive enjoyment from confusing reality and fiction. Their goal is simply to take fictions that are out there and promote them to fictions that are theirs alone. It is no coincidence that otaku like parodies. It may be that cosplay (kosupure) and fan magazines are best understood as examples of this process of fictionalization. Popular anime always attract so-called SS (“short” or “side” story) writers, who borrow the setting and characters from these works, write novels and scenarios in different versions, and then upload them to online forums. What is the motivation behind this form of expression that does not earn them a penny? Is it self-promotion? A service to other fans? If it were just that, surely parody or criticism would be more effective. I believe that “SS” is precisely how otaku manage to possess these works. They let the work “possess” them, weave a different story out of the same materials, and share it with the community. This process is a kind of “ritual of possession” practiced within the otaku community.
Even if they are not that serious, otaku are generally critics. All otaku have something that should probably be called a critical drive, including even cases like Miyazaki Tsutome. In fact, a fan who has forgotten his or her critical perspective is not an otaku. Otaku feel compelled to talk endlessly about a work and its creator. Their talk does not stop at the work itself but also extends to include their own relationship to it. When otaku engage in critique, their passion also merges with their enthusiasm for possession through the creation of new fictions. To put it very dramatically, the only way that otaku have of acquiring the objects they love is by fictionalizing them and turning them into their own works. This inevitably leads to the creation of new fictional contexts.
It was not his extraordinary intelligence or the accuracy of his information that made possible Okada Toshio’s status as the Otaku King. More than anything it was his production of a legendary animated film called Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise (oritsu uchugun: Oneamisu no tsubasa, 1987) as a rank amateur. He was also involved in producing the masterpiece of the OVA, Gunbuster (Toppu o nerae!). The careful and deliberate way in which he marketed these anime drew from his own experiences as an otaku and was itself a brilliant form of critique. The otaku business is one of those rare fields in which superb critical acumen can translate directly into highly creative work. If Okada is respected among otaku, it is because of his astounding ability to create fictions. For otaku, the kind of accuracy of information required by maniacs is nice, but not essential. And the fact is that Okada sometimes gets things wrong because of his own preoccupations. But this is tolerated as an aspect of his idiosyncratic style. This is a context in which even a mistake can be forgivable as long as it provides interesting fodder for fictionalization.
What is Fiction?
The concept of fiction as I have been using it thus far is also probably in need of some elucidation. As I mentioned earlier, a high level of fictional context does not necessarily imply a high level of fictionality. One can easily imagine a paradoxical situation in which an autobiography overflowing with empty rhetorical flourishes might seem less realistic than a piece of honest metafiction. But the problem is more complex even than that. It may be, for example, that the rhetorical flourishes of that autobiography actually say something very real about the desires of its author.
There is really no objective set of standards to measure the fictionality of a given work. This is why I have introduced the neutral concept of the “fictional context.” As I explained earlier, this is an “imaginary concept” determined by the number of forms of media necessary to mediate the creation of a work. I insist on the term imaginary for the following reason. We are not actually able to count the number of types of media involved. Only the recipient has the right to determine what is citation and what is parody. If a given citation is to be interpreted as the original, the fictional context for the recipient will be low. This involvement of the receiver’s subjective viewpoint makes things even more complicated.
Of course, it is easy to understand fictionality as long as one does not insist on too much rigor in the definition. One could simply say something along the lines of “What seems like a lie is fiction and what seems real is the thing itself.” Faced with such a clear statement, the rigorous examination of fictionality seems like a meaningless detour. But is it really? Let’s take a closer look. The statement “what seems like a lie is fiction and what seems real is the thing itself” is nothing more than a tautology. It is true enough, but it means nothing.
The discussion gets confusing because of the intervention of the adjective “real” (riaru). “Fictional” and “Real” are not opposites. If they were, an expression like “Real fiction” (riaru na kyoko) would be meaningless. Instead, it is fiction and reality that are opposites, which leaves us with the problem of how to define reality.
What is reality? A raw, unmediated experience? Is that what reality is? Since the Aum Shinrikyo incident this kind of simplistic equation no longer holds. Raw, real experiences are the most deceptive of all . The mystical experiences and altered states of consciousness that Aum members experienced during their training have made us all too aware of the fundamental fallacy in the idea that “actual experiences” equal reality. So we ask again: What is reality?
Indeed, it should go without saying that reality is itself a form of fiction. At least the word reality as we use it in general refers to the fiction that is “the everyday world we live in.” It is the fiction that is shared most widely. Some people might attach conditions to their belief in it, but our degree of adaption to society is judged according to whether or not we have accepted it. In this sense it is perhaps the most powerful of all fictions.
Psychoanalysis teaches us that we can never touch reality in its raw form. “Reality” is another name for the impossible, at least for Lacan. Let us review Lacan’s triad: the Real, the Symbolic, the Imaginary. These constitute a topological division of the human psyche, where, in my understanding, the emphasis falls on how people experience things. The Real, as I just mentioned, is “the realm of the impossible”: a paradoxical realm that exists because it is impossible to experience. The Symbolic is for the most part synonymous with the system of language. It is external to the subject and referred to as the “Other.” That language is other to us means that it is a transcendental entity positioned outside the subject. When we speak we experience its existence, but we cannot be completely conscious of that experience itself. The Imaginary is the realm of images and representations, and also of narcissism, since it is located inside the subject (*14). It is here that “meaning” and “experiences” are possible.
What does it mean for us to experience “fiction”? Experience, we have seen, becomes possible in the Imaginary. Whenever we have a conscious experience of anything, that experience happens in the Imaginary. In this sense there can be no essential distinction between “everyday reality” and “fiction.” (*15)
But, needless to say, that would be a mistake. It is a misreading of Lacan to suggest that one can grasp the Symbolic through the Imaginary. But this misreading is everywhere. Hiroki Azuma, for example, has claimed that in today’s society “the Symbolic stopped functioning.” He points to the deterioration of popular song lyrics as an example.
This is an interesting argument in itself, but it is based on the same misunderstanding.
Lacan’s tripartite model would be just a tool for meaningless speculation if we did not accept its universality. And psychoanalysis would be impossible without the assumption that we are and always will be “neurotics” from the moment that we attain language. And as long as we are neurotics, this tripartite division of the world, or at least the topological relations among its parts, will hold.
Let me make my own position clear. From this point on I will keep the focus on the interactions between media and the Imaginary, and I will not postulate any transformations or shifts in the Symbolic or the Real. This means that otaku can be discussed only in imaginary terms. In other words, we can postulate no structural difference between the non-otaku subject and the otaku subject, because both are neurotics and both stand in the same relation to the Symbolic. Therefore we can now reject completely the claim made by Osawa quoted above. Similarly, it is impossible to identify anything psychoanalytically unique about the otaku as a community. In fact, it is not uncommon to find certain pathologies among those who insist on the uniqueness of the otaku. I have abandoned the attempt to speak of the psychopathology of the otaku in structural terms. Instead, I will stick with descriptions on the level of the Imaginary. This is unavoidable as long as psychoanalysis is my primary method.
I never answered the question I posed earlier: How is it that we experience “everyday reality”? Distinguishing it from fiction is always a function of the Imaginary. In concrete terms, this has to do with our image of the degree to which experiences are mediated. Fiction can arise only out of the consciousness - and not the “fact” - that is experience is a mediated one(*17).
Thus the media have no other function vis-a-vis experience than to provide this kind of consciousness of being mediated. Or to put it the other way around, “everyday reality” is nothing more than a set of experiences that emerge from a consciousness of not being mediated. This difference between a consciousness of being and not being mediated, moreover, is only an imaginary one. Let me emphasize this once more. For us neurotics “everyday reality” has no essential privilege. This is also evident from the fact that patients suffering from dissociative disorder (a neurotic pathology) experience everyday reality as if it were fiction(*18).
[*14. The distinction I am making here between the inside and the outside of the subject is a provisional one meant only to aid the reader’s understanding. In strict psychoanalytic terms the distinction would be untenable.
*15. When I use the word “reality” in this book without any further specification I am referring to this kind of imaginary or everyday reality. When I mean reality in the psychoanalytic sense - that material realm that is impossible for us to experience - I use Lacan’s term “the Real,” with a capital “R.” That said, I have little occasion from here on to use the latter term. The focus in this book is on the relationship between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Fighting girls are the product of neurotic desire and have nothing to do with psychosis, which of course makes it impossible to postulate the incursion of the Real when describing them. I am including this proviso because I realize that my earlier statement that “Reality is a form of fiction” might be misunderstood as a profession of belief in metaphysics or idealism.
*17. There are “media” (baikai) everywhere, starting with television, film, manga, and the Internet. And of course there are also more individualized media like the telephone, letters, and email. But these are not all. All relations with other people in daily life rely on some sort of media. This kind of media might be called “role consciousness.” Thus every individual takes on multiple interpersonal situations. For example, when I interview a patient as a psychiatrist, that experience is mediated by “doctor-role consciousness.” As a result, the treatment relation becomes fictionalized in a way. This provides a defense against the interview experience exercising too great an influence on the doctor’s daily life.
*18. Symptoms of dissociative illness cause people to complain of pain because of losing the sense of reality with regard to self and the external world, feeling that they are no longer themselves, or feeling that other people and landscapes are somehow unreal, as if seen through a membrane. These are seen often in cases of neurosis, depression, and schizophrenia. While in recent years it has been used to refer to cases in which patients feel as if another self is watching their body and movements from the outside, I use the term here in the former meaning.]
Otaku and Fiction
People who have an otaku mentality, with a high affinity for fiction, are likely to have a latent discomfort with reality whether or not they have actually been able to adapt to it. But this is not a serious issue; for them, it is more on the scale of, “Everyday reality is a drag!” At the very least we can say that this refusal to adapt does not lead in any simple way to the flight from reality and thence to refuge in a fictional world.
Hard-core otaku have their own unique stance toward fiction and are able to enjoy anime, for example, on multiple levels. To put this in the terms I used earlier, they are able to switch freely between levels of fictional context. As I mentioned earlier, they see reality as a kind of fiction. Since this means they do not necessarily privilege reality, it can easily be mistaken for an avoidance of reality. So while otaku do not in any way “confuse fiction with reality,” they are uninterested in setting fiction and reality up against each other. If anything they are able to find reality (riariti <lol>) equally in both fiction and reality (genjitsu).
In fact, otaku discover a multilayered reality (riariti) even in the fictionality of fiction. They see and enjoy reality (riariti) in terms of every standard by which fiction can be judged, including not just the quality of anime characters but also the script and character design, visual direction, marketing, criticism, and particular points of appreciation. This is the otaku’s special ability . When this is developed sufficiently, it becomes the three abilities that Okada describes as the “eye of the aesthete,” the “eye of the master,” and the “eye of the connoisseur.” Otaku do not just command a great deal of information, they must also be able to identify instantaneously these different standards of fictionality and shift to the appropriate level on which to appreciate them. This means not just falling in love and losing oneself in the world of a single work, but somehow staying sober while still indulging one’s feverish enthusiasm .
Total immersion in the world of the work on the object level has nothing to do with the essence of the otaku. Stephen King’s novel Misery, which was also made into a film, depicts a fan like this. She is in love with a certain series of novels and cannot tolerate its ending in a way that she does not like. So she makes the author a prisoner in her home and threatens him so that he will write the ending she wants. If such a woman actually existed, I would be happy to award her with the prize for confusing fiction and reality. But otaku try to stay as far away as possible from this kind of violence and crazed enthusiasm.
What would an otaku do if a story he liked ended badly? In fact, we have an excellent example of just such a case. Neon Genesis Evangelion (Sin seiki Evangerion), which I discuss in more detail later, created a whole social phenomenon as a result of its ending. Until the last half of the series it was a giant robot anime of unprecedented sophistication. But the problem came with the last episode, when the protagonist suddenly started to talk at great length about his own inner strugglers, leading to an ending in which he experienced inner salvation. Most of the fans were furious with this ending.
But did they criticize the creator Anno Hideaki directly? Of course, there were many who did. But at the same time huge numbers of fans began to write their own “eva” stories. And this was certainly the proper otaku response. They did not see the author as absolute. They were not just fans, but connoisseurs, critics, and authors themselves. This blurring of the distinction between producer and consumer is another characteristic of the otaku. In that sense, if we limit the discussion to how they relate to fiction, Osawa’s point is right after all. For otaku the place that is supposed to be taken by the transcendent author is extremely close to his or her own internal other.
The Psychopathology of the Otaku
Of course, the otaku do exist in reality, and it is important to recognize that. The Comic Market, which I mentioned earlier, for example, is a space in which the logic of the otaku predominates over “everyday reality.” But one cannot say it is not reality. It is a world in which fan magazines produced by serious otaku can generate revenues in the millions of yen. It is, in other words, a space in which the ability to produce enjoyable fictions is privileged above all else. And there we see on display only a small portion of the otaku’s ability to modify reality. Their ability to see reality as a kind of fiction is certainly a strength. The elite of the otaku are capable of changing reality to fit their tastes, just as Bill Gates and Michael Jackson did.
But while multiple orientation has the advantage of allowing people to shift perspectives flexibly, it also has a sort of pathological limitation. The more accurately the otaku shifts from one perspective to another, the more the framework of the experience as a whole cannot help but shift toward the fictional. And when multiple orientations are given equal weight, we lose the singularity that is the essential quality of reality. This is probably why otaku often complain of dissociative episodes and seem lost in the ordinary world. Thus multiple orientation can sometimes be viewed as an escape from reality. Yet even the expression “escape from reality” may be only a provisional one.
What provides the impetus for people to become otaku? To an outside observer it may appear to be caused by an episode of adaptational failure of some sort. But is it not possible for someone to become an otaku without that sort of trauma? Could it be that the more fundamental cause that makes people into otaku is to be found in the excessive immersion in the multiple orientations that we have been discussing? If so, why is it that otaku engage in this kind of immersion?
<…>
“The destining of revealing is in itself not just any danger, but danger as such.” from The Question Concerning Technology by Martin Heidegger.
For the great Persian scholar Avicenna, sensory phantasms were processed through five virtues or powers corresponding to five cavities in the cranium; phantasy or common sense, imagination, cogitative virtue, the estimative virtue, and finally the reminiscent virtue. According to Georgio Agamben in his work Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, Avicenna conceives of this gradation through the inner senses as a "progressive 'disrobing' (denudatio) of the phantasm from its material accidents."
<..>
I believe that this is where sexuality comes to have a very close relationship to all of this. We must recognize the fictionality and multilayered quality of sexuality. When people are sexually excited by the image of a woman in an anime, they may be taken aback at first, but they are already infected by the otaku bug. This is the crucial dividing point. How is it possible for a drawing of a woman to become a sexual object?
“What is it about this impossible object, this woman that I cannot even touch, that could possibly attract me?” This sort of question reverberates in the back of the otaku’s mind. A kind of analytic perspective on his or her own sexuality yields not an answer to this question but a determination of the fictionality and the communal nature of sex itself. “Sex” is broken down within the framework of fiction and then put back together again. In this respect one could say that the otaku undergoes hystericization: the otaku’s acts of narrative take the form of eternally unanswerable questions posed toward his or her own sexuality. And the narratives of hysterics cannot help but induce from us all manner of interpretations. This is of course what has led me to the present analysis.

After escaping my childhood, I extensively engaged in expressive writing, documenting the various forms of abuse, my fears, uncertainties, and the trauma I experienced, along with the daily struggles of being alive and surviving extreme abuse.
My writing was unstructured and sometimes grammatically incorrect, as its sole purpose was to release pent-up emotions. I recommend trying this approach if you ever feel overwhelmed by emotions and find yourself feeling paralyzed by them. It can be incredibly cathartic. But you can also write your story in more cohesive terms - anything from autobiography and memoir to diaries and journals, as well as oral testimonies and eyewitness accounts…short memoir pieces and personal essays, the possibilities are endless!
In writing about my trauma, I was also acquiring certain life skills that were helping me cope in my day-to-day life. In giving vent to my deep-seated pain and sadness, I was learning to accept them as a part of me. In accepting, I was healing; and, in sharing my story with my readers, I was emerging from my isolation and seeking solidarity.
Victims of sexual violence remain silent because, often, they aren’t believed. But, for example, when my mother wrote her book “ A Prisoner by No Crime of My Own” the response from her readers overwhelmed her- she found strength to keep going.
Like life – and survival – writing follows an organic trajectory where the individual must go from acknowledging one’s pain and defining it to confronting it, through action and words. To overcome one’s trauma is to be able to distance oneself from it, and writing teaches one how to achieve that critical distance.
Try it! Even 5 mins a day will help you change your own narrative forever.
B 🤍

This is from a book review of a book analyzing the Soka Gakkai presence in the USA between 1960 and 1975 - I've ordered a copy and should be able to post some more in-depth analysis when it gets here. For clarity, here is the reviewer's explanation of what "NSA" stands for:

At various stages in the organization’s history, the acronym NSA has stood for Nichiren Shoshu of America, Nichiren Shoshu Academy, and Nichiren-shoshu Soka-gakkai of America. The acronym SGI-USA (for Soka Gakkai International, USA) was adopted in 1991. This review will use “NSA” except when referring only to the organization at present. (Footnote, p. 352)

Only "adopted in 1991" AFTER Ikeda's humiliating excommunication. I'm sure he was notified that if NSA didn't change its name forthwith, his organization was going to be sued. The reviewer is a former higher-up in NSA (now SGI-USA), one of the PAID editors of its monthly magazine Seikyo Times, now renamed Living Buddhism (so a real inner-circle insider). She rarely strays into territory that could be identified as criticism of her former cult besties.
Starting on p. 353:

The performance of shakubuku—proselytizing—is accordingly seen as both a powerful cause for transforming one’s own karma and a compassionate action leading to the happiness of all. Snow suggests that the sense of personal mission, responsibility, and special status acquired through internalizing this vision motivates NSA members every bit as much as the promise of material and spiritual benefits to be gained from chanting. NSA’s goal

is not—as it might appear at first glance to the casual observer—the development of a cult of selfish, egoistic, happy chanters, unmindful of the problems and conditions of the rest of the world. Rather, it is the realization of something far more ambitious and global—the construction of...a civilization that not only transcends the limitations of the major philosophies and international powers in the world today, but one in which peace, prosperity, happiness, and creative spontaneity are enjoyed by all. (pp. 63-64)

Except that the rank selfishness and self-centeredness of SGI-USA members has been abundantly documented, of course...

In analyzing NSA as a proselytizing movement, Snow asks: How are potential recruits initially contacted and their nominal conversion secured? While NSA makes use of publications, large-scale cultural events, and college seminars to reach out to potential converts, Snow finds that recruitment is done chiefly through members’ existing family and social networks. He sees this as a function of NSA being a non-communal, “open” movement that does not demand the severing of extra-movement ties; in contrast, groups that are communal and relatively “closed” (such as the Krishna movement or the Unification Church) must make greater efforts to win recruits from among strangers. Of 330 people in Snow’s statistical sampling who joined NSA between 1966 and 1974, only 18% were recruited by strangers. This comes as a surprise, in that the popular perception of NSA during the 1970s was shaped by members’ assertive “street shakubuku”—going to sidewalks, parking lots, shopping malls, or other public places to invite passersby to introductory discussion meetings. Snow argues, however, that the value to NSA of street shakubuku lies chiefly in its function as a “commitment-building mechanism that serves to strengthen members’ identification with the organization, rather than in the numbers of converts it produces.

THIS, in other words.

The local NSA discussion meeting itself, typically held in members’ homes, constitutes the chief forum for introducing newcomers to the practice and winning nominal conversions of guests. Shakubuku closely examines the dynamics and strategies of such meetings.
In discussing “who joined and why,” Snow argues that “structural strain” explanations attributing the rise of new religious movements to deprivation, inequity, or other stresses in the social order do not fully explain why some individuals join such movements while others do not. He suggests that the dramatic growth of NSA—and of other movements—was fueled by the emergence in the late 60s and 70s of a large demographic constituency of young, single adults, many of whom were students or people lacking permanent positions of employment.

That was the Baby Boom generation. Note that in the USA, the Christian proselytizing religious movement "Jesus People" (aka "Jesus Freaks") was WAY bigger than any silly little weirdo Japanese cult could ever hope to be here in the US - estimates of the "Jesus Movement" membership ranged from 30,000 to 300,000 to 20 million! The SGI-USA's claimed membership remains officially at upwards of 300,000 while the estimates of active membership are between 3,000 and 30,000 (a generous upper limit).

As further “microdeterminants” of who joined NSA, Snow found the most important factors to be the possession of preexisting ties with NSA members, ample discretionary time, and absence of strong, countervailing commitments.

As described here as well:

In other words, they were not greatly encumbered by work, marital, or kinship ties. While we have only the 'ever-divorced' comparison with the general population, it seems safe to say that converts were in a good position to take on new religious commitments because they were structurally free of many social ties.

That's a really nice way of saying "lacking social connections and a social circle." It also explains nicely why those who join SGI-USA would be so susceptible to the cultish "love bombing" - INSTANT FRIENDS! INSTANT COMMUNITY!! I FINALLY BELONG!!! Source

When a family moves to a new town, one of the first things they do to set up a new set of social connections is to join a religious organization, typically the neighborhood church. We're social animals; having a community is important to us.

Snow is also critical of theories that seek to explain why people join new religious movements in terms of mental predispositions such as alienation, search for meaning, personal crisis, or hunger for community. Strong affective bonds with someone inside the movement and intense interaction with the group are presented as more important factors. Moreover, as Snow acutely observes,

psychological/motivational theories of conversion face a serious methodological difficulty in that they rely on members’ testimonials, which may well reflect the individual's unconscious restructuring of his or her past history in light of a newly acquired worldview.

And we've ALL seen how SGI leaders routinely change SGI members' "experiences" to punch up the drama (to the point of coaching the SGI member on how to appear more sincere - "You should cry as you tell it to make it more emotional"), or to make sure they include enough Ikeda Sensei worshipfulness, or adequately reflect whatever "campaign" the current SGI "rhythm" is emphasizing. Remember, an "experience" is a form of indoctrination, so it had better have all the indoctrination elements, right?
This is really important:

Members' own accounts of “why I joined” may thus be artifacts of the conversion process as much as they are explanations of why the conversion took place. Snow suggests that movements such as NSA serve not only to express preexisting needs and stresses but as “important agitational, problem-defining, need-arousal, and motive-producing agencies” and that “the latter function may oftentimes have primacy over the former” (p. 237). His discussion of “the convert as social type” suggests that conversion not be defined in terms of subjective personal transformation, which is hard to assess, but of outwardly identifiable changes in the members’ universe of discourse. Such changes include reconstruction of autobiography in line with a newly adopted worldview, and embracement of a “master attribution scheme" or unitary explanation of why things are as they are, such as NSA’s attribution of suffering to individual karma.

"Mappo, the Eeeeevil Latter Day of the Law!" "Fundamental darkness!" "EVERYBODY needs to 'do human revolution' because they're inherently flawed, hopeless, sinful, and LOST!" "EVERYBODY NEEDS A 'MENTOR'!!!!!" I'm sure you can think of other excuses for causes of suffering that SGI members randomly spurt out in fits of arrogance and pompousness.

Classic Literature: 1. "The Hanged Man" in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922): - Reference: Eliot's influential modernist poem references the tarot card "The Hanged Man" in the context of spiritual crisis and renewal. - Significance: The card symbolizes sacrifice and surrender, echoing themes of transformation and rebirth explored in Eliot's work.

1. "The Magician" in Somerset Maugham's "The Magician" (1908):
   • Plot Element: Maugham's novel revolves around an occultist and magician named Oliver Haddo, inspired by the tarot card "The Magician."
   • Symbolism: The character embodies the archetype of the Magician, using mystical powers and symbolism associated with the tarot card to drive the narrative.

Contemporary Literature: 3. "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern (2011): - Tarot Influence: The novel features a magical competition between two illusionists, and tarot cards are used as a divinatory tool by one of the characters. - Symbolic Elements: Tarot motifs, including the Fool's journey and card readings, contribute to the atmospheric and mysterious setting of the story.

1. "The Raven Cycle" Series by Maggie Stiefvater (2012-2016):
   • Character Incorporation: The character Ronan Lynch in this series is associated with tarot cards, particularly "The Magician."
   • Narrative Impact: Tarot symbolism is interwoven into the character's development, reflecting themes of power, transformation, and the manipulation of reality.

Magical Realism: 5. "Like Water for Chocolate" by Laura Esquivel (1989): - Tarot Spread Structure: Each chapter in this magical realist novel is introduced with a tarot card, setting the thematic tone for the narrative. - Symbolic Significance: Tarot cards serve as a creative and symbolic framework, guiding readers through the emotional and magical journey of the protagonist.

1. "The House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende (1982):
   • Tarot Readings: The novel includes scenes where characters engage in tarot readings, providing insights into their destinies and influencing the unfolding events.
   • Symbolism: Tarot cards become a symbolic and mystical element, enhancing the magical realism inherent in Allende's storytelling.

Dystopian Fiction: 7. "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood (1985): - Tarot Imagery: Tarot cards, particularly the deck known as the "Jezebels Tarot," appear in the novel as a forbidden and subversive element within the dystopian society. - Resistance Symbolism: The use of tarot cards symbolizes resistance and individual agency in a repressive regime.
From classic literature to contemporary works, tarot cards have served as powerful symbols, narrative devices, and sources of inspiration. Their presence in literature often extends beyond mere divination, delving into themes of fate, transformation, and the complexities of human experience. As a rich tapestry of symbolism, tarot continues to weave its way through the realms of imagination and storytelling, adding layers of meaning to literary narratives.
Fantasy and Magical Themes: 8. "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (1990): - Prophecy and Tarot: The novel incorporates tarot cards as part of the prophecies, and the card "The Tower" plays a significant role in the narrative. - Humorous Twist: Gaiman and Pratchett infuse humor and irreverence into the use of tarot cards, blending fantasy and satire.

1. "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern (2011):
   • Magical Setting: Beyond using tarot cards as a divination tool, the novel features the Le Cirque des Rêves, a magical circus where each tent is inspired by a tarot card.
   • Atmospheric Influence: Tarot symbolism enhances the enchanting and mysterious atmosphere of the story, contributing to the novel's magical realism.

Mystery and Detective Fiction: 10. "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902): - Tarot Card Allusion: The novel contains a reference to a death card that could be interpreted as resembling a tarot card. This adds an element of mystery and foreshadowing to the narrative.

1. "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco (1988):
   • Tarot Conspiracies: Eco's complex novel delves into conspiracies and secret societies, incorporating elements of tarot symbolism as characters explore esoteric mysteries.
   • Intellectual Exploration: Tarot cards become part of the intellectual and symbolic tapestry in a narrative that explores the boundaries between reality and imagination.

Science Fiction: 12. "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson (1992): - Tarot as Code: In this cyberpunk novel, tarot cards are used as a form of code for a virus that plays a crucial role in the plot. - Futuristic Integration: The novel explores how ancient symbols, like those found in tarot, can find new meaning in a futuristic, technology-driven world.
Romance and Relationship Dynamics: 13. "The Lovers" by Vendela Vida (2010): - Tarot Theme: In this novel, the protagonist becomes involved in a project where she creates a deck of tarot cards to explore themes of love and relationships. - Personal Journey: Tarot becomes a tool for self-discovery and reflection on romantic relationships, adding a unique twist to the exploration of love in the narrative.
In literature, tarot cards emerge as versatile narrative tools, blending seamlessly into various genres and themes. Authors employ them for foreshadowing, symbolism, and to explore the complexities of human existence. Whether in the realms of fantasy, mystery, science fiction, or romance, tarot cards contribute to the richness and depth of storytelling, offering readers a glimpse into the mystical and symbolic dimensions of the human experience.
Historical Fiction: 14. "The Eight" by Katherine Neville (1988): - Quest for a Chess Set: The novel weaves a complex narrative involving a quest for a mystical chess set, with each piece representing a tarot card. The tarot cards play a central role in unraveling the mysteries within the story. - Symbolic Elements: Tarot cards are intricately linked to historical events and characters, providing a symbolic framework for the unfolding adventure.

1. "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2001):
   • Tarot Card Readings: The novel features a mysterious character who conducts tarot card readings, offering insights into the destinies of the main characters.
   • Atmospheric Symbolism: Tarot cards contribute to the atmospheric and gothic elements of the narrative, adding layers of mystery and intrigue.

Coming-of-Age Narratives: 16. "The Raven Cycle" Series by Maggie Stiefvater (2012-2016): - Tarot Card Symbolism: Tarot cards, especially "The Magician," play a significant role in the character development and coming-of-age themes of the series. - Personal Growth: The use of tarot reflects the characters' journeys of self-discovery, empowerment, and understanding their places in the world.
Philosophical Exploration: 17. "The Castle of Crossed Destinies" by Italo Calvino (1969): - Silent Characters: In this experimental novel, characters communicate solely through laying out tarot cards to tell their stories. The tarot becomes a visual language, and the narrative explores the interconnectedness of stories and destiny. - Symbolic Interpretation: The novel delves into the nature of narrative, choice, and fate through the lens of tarot symbolism.
Memoir and Autobiography: 18. "M Train" by Patti Smith (2015): - Personal Reflections: In her memoir, Patti Smith reflects on her life, travels, and creative process. Tarot cards appear as a recurring motif, offering glimpses into the author's introspective and spiritual moments. - Intuitive Guidance: The author uses tarot as a tool for personal reflection and guidance, highlighting its role in her creative and spiritual journey.
Literary Criticism: 19. "Tarot as a Way of Life: A Jungian Approach to the Tarot" by Karen Hamaker-Zondag (2001): - Psychological Exploration: This non-fiction work explores tarot from a Jungian perspective, delving into the archetypal and symbolic dimensions of the cards. - Integration with Jungian Psychology: The author uses tarot as a means to explore the collective unconscious and the psychological aspects of the human experience.
Tarot cards continue to be a rich source of inspiration for authors across diverse genres. Whether as a narrative device, a symbolic tool, or a means of philosophical exploration, tarot's presence in literature enhances storytelling by tapping into the mystical, psychological, and symbolic facets of the human condition. As authors weave these archetypal cards into their narratives, readers are invited to explore realms of meaning, mystery, and self-discovery.

Have you been looking for someone to share your interests and passions with? Someone that never runs out of genuine curiosity towards all things? A person that will in turn do the same and share everything that interests him? With whom you can sire the purest dynasty and rule the planet in a firm, yet kind grip? Is that someone tall, dark and (according to third parties) handsome?
Then look no further. All that and much more comes in this exclusive, one of a kind package. Included is a free subscription to heaps of art, memes, cute animal pictures, future dominion over Australia and lots more!
You know those people looking for their other halves? Losers. You are one, I am one, together, that’s two, right? Wrong! Let’s improve each other’s lives and help each other be the best we can be and that 2 goes up. The other couples are stuck at 0.5+0.5=1, while we are up to 3, 4… 5? "B..but love isn't a competition" is surely what those couples we leave in the dust will say.
If this once in a lifetime offer entices you, see more included features, as you’ll be getting a guy who:

• Is 194 cm tall
• Speaks fluent Croatian, English (duh), German, Serbian, broken French and learning Polish
• Loves to cook and is rather good at it
• Actually cares how he dresses
• Is a great cuddler and fine spending the whole day at home, but will also outlast you in every club or party you'd wanna go to
• Loves to travel with plenty of wonderful pictures form my travels to share
• Has a wide spectrum in music, ranging from classic over pop all the way to black metal
• Same for movies, with things like Dune (old and new) over the Godfather all the way to Pride and Prejudice, not to forget one of the greatest of all time: The Room
• Has played video games since age 3, with games such as Elder Scrolls, Elden Ring, STALKER, CK2, REmake2, RE4, FF XII, AC: Origins, Crusader Kings, Mass Effect, Dragon Age being some particular standouts
• A late-bloomer in regards to reading, with House of Leaves, Dune, Atlas Shrugged, ASOIAF, American Psycho, Metro 2035, Steppenwolf, etc. being some standouts

And concluding this long list of facts about myself, why not a picture of me? Sure, it is a bit dated, but captures my personality just nicely. But enough about me, lets talk about you, or well, the very basics of what I am looking for in a partner:

• Between 19 and 26
• Ready for actual committment
• Talkative, passionate about the things you like and curious to know more
• From Poland (especially Krakow), but anywhere nearby is fine too
• NOT: fat/chubby, vegan, vegetarian,

If you managed to endure thus far, hit me up. You've learned plenty about me so let me know about you in any shape you seem fit, maybe have me guess what statements about you are true, or write a 20 page autobiography, surprise me!
PS: it's not my main account jsyk.