Welcome!

 I’m Cecilia, and this is my blog, Rational Ignorance, for my friends who miss me from FB and anyone else interested in my brand of nonsense.  So I guess right now, the things I want to write about are personal growth/health/politics (yes, for me those are that closely related)!, social observations, and media and product reviews (including adaptive/accessible tech for people with disabilities (me) and neurodiverse people (yes, also me).

Right now, I have just begun a Facebook hiatus because I became overwhelmed by the lack of empathy displayed day after day, year after year.  I have started to think, after enough time online, that humanity isn’t worth saving.  And not only can that make me kind of an asshole (I’m sorry, being scared and hurt and angry all the time frays everything), it’s both dangerous to me personally (people with severe mental illness can’t fuck around or we can die) and to my part in the work of the tapestry of life.  I’m built so that my brain gets the biggest chemical rewards from helping, healing (myself and others), growing and defending knowledge, pursuing justice, and community-building.  As long as the current society doesn’t collapse, I want  to cut out parts of my life that don’t involve me doing those things and/or survival.  I only have so much energy.  I can’t waste it in anger when there’s so much to be done.  I guess what I’m saying in this paragraph is that I plan to try to figure out how to restructure my relationship to certain tech and exploring ways to deal with anger.  Some technologies shouldn’t be used, and some should be regulated and used sparingly.  The AI art proponents in Star Trek Shitposting (yes, seriously) accidentally both made me angry enough to get off FaceBook for a bit, and made clear that I needed to, because continuing to use it without a period of critical distance and reassessment would be deeply hypocritical.  Tech, even useful tech, isn’t always an unalloyed good, I’m not an angry person by constitution, so I never bothered finding ways to deal with it, thinking it would transmute into sadness as usual.  I can no longer ignore the fact that that is not the case, and that not facing that is harming me and my causes and the people I love.  If anyone has good resources on dealing with anger (particularly political anger) and powerlessness, please share them in the comments.  I think now, with access to my meds, I’n doing chemically better, but I am not fully recovered, and I think I may have just medicated myself into leveling up enough that my brain triggered a “you’re well enough to deal with this painful exhausting growth, have a bouquet.”  If that’s what’s necessary, bring it on. I lived for nearly two decades just not to make life harder for other people, I’m not afraid of a little work.

I can’t get deep into my future career plans, but no one will be surprised to know I’m contemplating a change. Until then, I am taking some online courses on UX/UI design, and because it’s self-paced, it’s still doable with unpredictable periods of brain fog.  I’ve been telling people individually, but soon I’ll write a post about why I think UX is the most potentially useful and dangerous tool since language.

In some ways, I’m very lucky.  I wouldn’t wish my mental illness on anyone, but thanks to being forced to do the work to figure myself out but also not dying because of amazing support networks, I was granted a boon: I always know who I am.  I can’t always remember, but I do always know.  Not everyone has that.