Losing Friends and Loved Ones to Covid 19

The best time to be alive!

Many of you may know, my father died this year from Covid 19. Well, technically, from what I hear, he had a booster. The booster left him with Covid-like-symptoms. You know, the ones that aren’t dangerous? And then, he was hospitalized with Covid 19, which is “rare” because the shots are slightly less than 100% effective. Next, they put him on a deadly ventilator and kidney destroying Remdesivir to save his life. Of course, we all know what happened in the end. He died “of Covid.”

All of that story I just told you is hearsay because I haven’t had a relationship with my father since early 2019 before I wrote my book. No one else who knew him while he was going through that is talking to me, either. Finding out my dad died from a cousin who wasn’t near him of something so utterly stupid and preventable has only validated how I feel about pretty much everything in the entire universe right now. That may sound like confirmation bias, but it’s not. Ironically, my dad would likely be alive if he hadn’t destroyed his immune system with a year of immune exhausting mRNA technology. We hear this phrase parroted all the time in the news “preventable diseases or deaths,” as if there is an undeniable causal link between all vaccines and their prevention of death or illness. How many of us knew otherwise?

Every day there’s an occasion for me to say to myself, “everything is the opposite of what it seems and nothing is the opposite of what it seems.” This is something my friend, Megan Sillito used to say. There’s clearly a lot of double-speak happening in the world right now. Gaslighting seems to be the pastime of choice among world leaders, “public health” authorities and media personalities. It’s never been more fucking obvious, though. Has it?

It also feels like I am daily living an “I told you so.” This doesn’t necessarily make me or any of us feel very happy about being proved right. I don’t know how many of you listen to Jack Spirko, but he was saying just yesterday how much he wished he was wrong about more things. The things we are right about lately seem to have deadly consequences to everyone else who assumed we were crazy. Even with deadly consequences, devastating consequences, many of us felt compelled at the time, per our ideologies to mind our own business and leave everyone else alone.

It’s ironic, too, because my buddy, Pete shared this quote from Auron MacIntyre in his Substack yesterday.

The shitty thing about this quote is it’s totally wrong, and the shittier part is it’s totally right. If we kept our mouths shut, and even if we just weren’t as impassioned as our “enemies” to interfere in their lives on account of our desire to “do unto others” and leave people alone (you know, live and let live), we might have saved the lives of those who stood against us. We are in a culture war hellbent on killing off most of humanity. We watched people who adamantly disagreed with us and tried to force their will on us get murdered and maimed by their own most deadly weapons. We might not think of these people as our enemies. They were, many of them, just duped into going along with something they didn’t understand. They thought those devices would save them and us. Still, the part of the culture that wanted to force its will on the rest of us is destroying itself, literally. This is why Auron’s quote above is inaccurate. By minding our own business, we’ve given the enemy the rope it needed to hang itself. Yet, in saying that and seeing how gruesomely apropos that metaphor is, none of us feels we are winning while watching our loved ones (who wanted to kill us, throw us in cages or ostracize us from civilization and did so, to some extent for 2 years) hang themselves and alienate themselves from us in the process. The victory of watching the people you once cared about literally die in any part because you minded your own business, is pretty fucking hollow.

It’s literally The Walking Dead out here. We’re watching the real enemy turn our friends and loved ones into unconscious psychopaths. We don’t want to hurt them because they still look like someone we used to know. What’s worse is that we have been programmed so hard to “live and let live” that we won’t even say anything to stop them from taking the poison (ideology) that turns them into zombies in the first place. Many of us are still arguing that since in a future world of Anarchotopia we might all get along, we should apply those same “mind your own business” ideologies in this present world. Live our principles and eventually others will come around, right? Or they’ll all be dead. They conveniently leave that part out. For instance, if I bring up the long term, detrimental health costs associated with gender reassignment hormone therapies, I will have at least 5 different virtue seeking Libretardians telling me publicly it’s none of their business. It’s a fucking education. I give it freely. I’m not forcing anyone to have anything to do with my social media account. It’s still a fucking fact, though. It’s being either significantly downplayed or totally unmentioned in the medical world who allegedly has a responsibility of some kind to supply the intended recipients a risk-benefit breakdown. I guess informed consent is a principle that’s none of most Libretardian’s fucking business.

All that said, I come bearing good news.

I know that this has all felt alienating. Those who didn’t die in the past two years still plague us daily with their terribly backwards ideas. Many of us had life-long friends speak to us in ways that were less than friendly or who just broke off the friendship altogether. Even if you kept your mouth shut to keep the peace with friends and family, you might have noticed that a lot of people you know have completely fallen for utter bullshit. Sadly, you might have noticed, too, they unwittingly helped to expel you from society regardless of whether they knew your views differed so much from theirs or not. Whatever you say, knowing better about what the science they trust does and does not indicate, these people have zero respect for you or the truth of their deified science. As a result, many friendships, marriages and other familial relationships are at this point hanging by a thread or are barely existent.

“Geez, Karen, what’s the good part?”

Now, you know. That’s it. Now, you know.

“I know my wife has no respect for what I think about anything substantive, and she has no intention of hearing anything I say as more than my silly feelings which she thoroughly discounts. She risked her life and our children’s lives injecting them with a Russian roulette shot regardless of my ardent protests. How is that a good thing to know?”

You know better, you do better. You are going to have to alter your relationships. That’s what you know. Like I said in a post before, you can’t let your loved ones, even your most loved ones keep treating you like a person they tolerate. Start respecting yourself, and you’ll become less tolerant of those who merely tolerate you. You might not have to alienate yourself from them. You do have to give them the opportunity to respect you knowing you will no longer settle for less. Then, let them decide what to do.

While I’m at it, I have been there. Maybe it wasn’t my marriage, but at last count, about zero of the people I called “family,” the ones I was gifted with coming into this world are standing with me today. Zero. 100% of that was my own decision. I am not a harsh, unloving person. I worked myself in knots trying to please, appease, silence myself and bend over backwards to not say the wrong thing and start a war with any of the family I had. I spent the first four decades of my life trying to be the perfect daughter and sister to these people, to be what they wanted and needed. I kept my mouth shut and my head down.

I, too, remember with MySpace and later Facebook, being very careful about what I said so I wouldn’t offend anyone or distance myself from anyone on social media. Now today, I am seen as having a brass vagina on social media. People assume I must not give a fuck what others think or feel. I assure you. I didn’t get to where I am today by not giving a fuck. I gave and still give a great deal of fucks. In fact, I give more fucks now than I have ever fucking given before.

I used to do everything I could to not lose people. That was my main goal and ambition in life. But, what happened over the course of my life and particularly after having kids was the realization that the things I was doing to preserve friends and family were alienating me from myself. At first, I didn’t notice. I was losing myself little by little, piece by piece. One day, I woke up, and I was gone. I had lost myself completely. I was failing as a mother. I had no way of coping with overwhelm. I was too heavily invested in a lot of desperate causes. It became most vividly clear to me I had disappeared when I wound up on the phone with a suicide hotline.

This was in the early days of my motherhood. I lived to not offend others. I know. Offense is a choice, their choice. I had no real control over it, but I was immersed in a world that didn’t respect my way of life. They didn’t just misunderstand my values, they discounted and actively tried to invalidate my ideals and values.

I never thought I would spank my kids. I read all these books that said it was wrong. My personal experience said it was wrong. My husband seemed to be onboard with my goals, but he was as easily swayed as I was about spanking. Both of us questioned whether we could really parent without spanking having seen no evidence of other parents living our principles successfully anywhere in our vicinity. We had no support system for our values. My life was spiraling out of control, and spanking seemed to be the only way that I could get a handle on it. I ended up spanking my kids for a couple weeks because I had no idea at the time what else I could do. I only knew what I was supposed to “not do.” That’s not a tool. (FYI to people who shame parents who spank. Parents spank out of shame and lack of resources. You aren’t helping.)

For me, personally, that was the final straw. Whatever else I was doing in my life that was right for everyone else but me, I still felt like I had lived up to this one single principle I valued: I don’t spank my kids. I’m not as bad as the people who raised me. Once I started punishing my kids with physical violence, I had nothing. I could also, consequently see immediately that it didn’t “work.” My oldest, sweetheart of a boy on the autism spectrum who would never hurt anyone started hitting my youngest to punish my one year old for not getting his way. They still weren’t behaving in a more tolerant fashion for me. So, what next? Spank harder? It quickly occurred to me that I was right all along, and spanking wasn’t the answer I needed. Sadly, I couldn’t even say, “I just didn’t know any better.”

At that moment, I deeply understood I had nothing. I had more to feel shame about than ever before. I called a suicide hotline in the middle of the night when my husband and kids were sleeping. And, this was the kicker. The hotline operator I spoke to was clearly bored hearing me try to talk between sobs and hyperventilation (I was ugly crying), and she eventually hung up on me. You know you have become pretty fucking unimportant when the one person in the world whose only job it is to listen and to help you drops your call. I was lost. I also had nothing more to lose at that point, except all those people who pushed me in this direction of self-annihilation and child abuse.

I decided to honor the little voice inside me and write in my, at the time, completely unseen blog. It felt like a life preserver for me. I shared my experience and asked for anyone who read it to help me put my values first from then on.

Little did I know… That blog lead ultimately to the destruction of my biological first family. While I implicated no one except myself in the blog, people apparently felt implicated. In their own shame, my family members came after me. One by one they reached out in their own vindictive ways to get me to shut down my blog. My sister, as a matter of fact, threatened to call CPS on me and report me for child abuse- if I didn’t remove the blog. It’s ironic, too, because her ultimatum was contingent on my blog being posted and not my children’s welfare or whether I continued to spank my kids. It was clear to anyone who read that submission that I was never going to spank my kids again. My family was never concerned for the safety of my kids. Last I checked, every one of my family members who stood behind the threat to have my children taken from me if my blog wasn’t unpublished supported spanking their own kids. In the blog, I simply poured my heart out about how much I was struggling and how my abuse at the hands of my mother (the only person who has no internet access and did not to my knowledge see the blog) had lead to this cycle I needed to break. My dad read it, and all he could say was, “How do you think this makes me look to other people that my own daughter is struggling? Did you think of how this makes me look?”

I did ultimately remove the blog. It was hard because it felt like such a life saver at the time. My kids safety from a treacherous state system was far more valuable to me than this life line, though. I permanently cancelled the sister who directly threatened me with the state. That was an easy decision for me. I knew she could still report me to the state to get even with me for cutting her off. However, I don’t think she would have had the support of anyone else in the family at that end, since my ever so offensive blog became unpublished. The blog served a bigger purpose for me. It alienated me from the thing that was driving my life in the wrong direction: the relationships I was clinging to in order to keep isolation at bay. Those relationships and how I was handling them were the source, entirely the source of my low sense of self-worth. As it turns out, not feeling shitty all the time leads to better friendships, happier thoughts, more energy, better parenting skills, more coping mechanisms, more creativity, more humor and even more financially profitable endeavors.

I opened my book with a single anonymous quote:

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, make sure you are not, in fact, surrounded by assholes.”

To that end, don’t let anyone else diagnose you prior to ridding yourself of the assholes. In my case, I surely would have been diagnosed as something prior to my liberation. If I had, I’d still be in therapy to this day trying to work harder on myself to make those relationships work-probably from an asylum. No one would be any the wiser.

I ended up using some extremely valuable techniques after that confrontation about my blog to keep my parents and other siblings in my life which I include in my teaching series “Say ‘Yes’ to Boundaries!” After reclaiming my values, my focus was on creating win-win scenarios in all my relationships. I was no longer negotiating my relationships from a fear of losing others. My values and my vision came first. As that happened, the conversations were more productive and revealing about the viability of my relationships and their relative importance to me being me. I became a bit full of myself in the best possible way.

My friend, Ricki Smith, used to say, “It’s better to be lonely and alone, than lonely and with someone.” I did go through some loneliness as my family broke apart one by one, but my loneliness no longer felt as isolating. Those people weren’t kicked out of my life. I stated for them my highest vision for keeping them in my life in a loving, harmonious and copacetic fashion. Each of them made their own decisions through their words and actions to opt out of that vision of harmony and togetherness. It was ok. I started to love being with myself again. As I became more clear in sharing my values on social media, in my blog, through my videos and in my book, I started to attract thousands of like minded people, friends who lived similar, non contradictory principles. I wasn’t alone anymore. I haven’t felt isolated a day in my life since then.

I do sometimes miss those people I had to let go. What I really miss about them isn’t them, though. I miss the hope that they’d be more than they were to me. There’s a comfort in knowing that.

I guess what I am saying here today ultimately is that if you feel isolated and lonely, check that you aren’t putting the ideals of others that run counter to your existence ahead of your own values and your life. As for me, the more committed I am to my values, as wildly inappropriate as it seems for me to share the parts of myself that feel the scariest and which feel the most vulnerable, the more invulnerable I become. That’s the thing about internal vulnerability. It’s generally not at all vulnerability. It’s an easter egg of sorts. Therein lies the key to open the door to wholeness, integrity and invulnerability. The things that once seemed to be the most alienating parts of myself are my biggest magnets to the kind of people that light me up and make my heart sing. The family I have created now through honoring my values and my vision are more than I ever needed or dreamed I could want.

So, yes, there’s a lot to this whole Covid 19 thing that makes everyone’s social lives feel harder than ever. I get that, but I think my husband, Aaron was right. “It’s never been an easier time to date.” There’s also never been an easier time to make friends for those of you experiencing loneliness or isolation in the world. There has always been a sea of people in the world that were absolutely wrong for you and who could get you to cancel yourself. Deep down, you know you always wished there was some sure fire way to identify those people or that one person who is right for you. For the majority of two years, it’s been as plain as the noses we could see on those one or two people’s faces. Literally, right? Finally, seeing is believing. As Megan said, “nothing is the opposite of what it seems.” At least, it’s true from this vantage.

So while this nonsense is going on in the world, and especially now more than ever, speak your sense into it so those true souls who are ready to brave the world in integrity can find you unmasked in your values and welcome you in.