Personals

Well, well, well.  Miracles abound every day.  My ex finally took down the information he had in his personal ad about my lack of basic mental health and my breakdown after being sexually assaulted. I had become privy to this ad due to an alert by a mutual friend on the same site, and yes, I have checked since then from time to time.

I suppose I should thank him for showing a shred of human decency, even if consideration of me was not a factor in changing his ad.  It's the closest thing I have ever had to an apology of any sort from him.

Just as background, I felt compelled to handwrite him a note about the ad some time ago, asking him to consider that I am only human and fragile, like the rest of the people on the planet, and that was the sum total of my "crime" in reacting as I did after I was attacked.

And frankly, no human being should EVER feel compelled to write such a note to someone who once purported to care about them.  Ever. In all the years I've had relationships, I have never felt the least need to write such a note, to anyone, no matter how badly things ended.  In fact, I've had exes come out of the woodwork to apologize to me in the last few years for unacceptable behavior towards me, and I accept these apologies: it takes a lot of humility and courage to do that. I've made many such apologies myself. But I've never had to ask for any form of mercy for something that clearly, at heart, was the doing of a perpetrator who came out of the dark and attacked me.

The truth is that there are very few people in modern society who escape mental health issues, from mild depression onwards.  Trauma can bring down sanity in a matter of minutes, though we are an astounding species in that our minds CAN recover.  Life can turn on a dime and not one person can ever become hubristic enough to believe that they can escape that.  Hubris is fatal, because it leaves you vulnerable and rather stupid, and often not able to cope when life throws its worst at you.

When you realize that life can and will, to greater and lesser degrees, turn on a dime, you can at least know that the good things in life are a true gift.  I've known friends who have gone from being able-bodied to disabled  in a matter of seconds, from having a stroke to being in an accident of some kind.  Heck, I broke my lower spine by slipping and falling off a high bank into a creek, on my back. It is a miracle that I can even sit and type, much less dance, or even walk around. That we are alive at all is a gift, given all the things that go against us.

To ridicule someone for any sort of mental health issues is a trait that belongs to a time when people wrote with dip pens on parchment, not now...yet in my opinion, these issues are still often treated with cruelty, judgement, and shaming.  And it should never, under any circumstances, be that way.