schmorpel

This is a long and rather personal text about why I feel depressed and how I am slowly coming to terms with my depression. Why did I post it here? I believe there's quite a few more people out there who are depressed because they feel alone in a world that is fucking depressing and who need to know their feelings are valid, and that whatever imperfect way they can find to express them is valid as well. I believe we should start talking about what makes us sad and angry, we should go public with our despair. This entire mess is connected and we are not mentally ill for feeling bad about it. I publish this relatively long, unfiltered and unpolished rant because it's better than silence. Hope to see you out there one of these days, in all your glorious rage and grief!

1. Depressed, alone, silent

I've struggled a lot with depression lately. For pretty much three years in a row I had subdued the depression with weed, but lately I've started feeling my feelings with unfiltered intensity and it has been insanely hard. Monday was probably the worst day in a long time. I was sitting at my laptop trying to finish a bullshit job. It seemed to be so absurdly atrocious being caught in business as usual typing some manual about how to create more realistically looking virtual worlds while the real world is quite literally on fire. Gaza starving, fascists on the rise, the usual wildfires of summer burning right behind the next hill, and me sitting there writing about ray tracing and virtual glint as if nothing was happening. I couldn't help but cry, and then pull myself together and type a bit more to beat the looming deadline, and then cry some more, and then type some more. It felt like I was raping my soul. I somehow managed to finish the job and then sat in despair for a full day. I thought it must be time to pack my things, return to my home country, ask for social assistance and enter therapy to be turned back into a functional human being. I had tried everything on the anti depression menu: take a walk, meet with friends, be creative ... yet the depression would return every day, this feeling of doom and helplessness, of not wanting to exist anymore.

Tuesday was the same again. I woke up to a world I don't want to live in anymore. More doom in the news, more children starving, more smoke in the sky. But something was different. I had felt mostly grief on Monday, today it was rage. No work to do, no motivation left to take a walk or meet with friends or be creative, so I sat with my rage. I had always learned that under the rage there sits grief, but this was the other way around. And then it hit me: rage and grief were not something going wrong in my brain, they were a reaction to everything that is wrong with the world right now. They are a healthy, normal reaction to what is going on. Screaming in anger against all the bad shit happening is a good thing! The only insanity in me was that I was expecting I could continue doing business as usual, remain silent, wait for it to pass, as I had been doing for so long. I had to express this rage and grief somehow - it is part of my truth and has a right to be out there!

2. You are permitted to express your feelings in a way that works for you

I took leftover fabric and made a Palestinian flag on my old sewing machine - a crude, imperfect flag, but nice and large. The next day I drove to a nearby motorway bridge, and tied the flag there. A tiny, pathetic, one-person protest against silence. Small, uncreative, near zero impact - so why bother? What did it change?

It changed "I don't want to exist anymore" into "I don't want to exist anymore in a world like this and I will speak up against what is happening."

Maybe there is one person passing that bridge who has been displaced from Palestine, and seeing the flag will make them feel less alone and less forgotten. Maybe there is one child asking their parents about it and learning about what is going on. Maybe there is one person seeing it and feeling inspired to speak up as well. The tiny pathetic things we do change nothing big, they are seeds.

They tell others "I feel this, too".

Like last week, when I saw the tiniest of flags on a festival of tens of thousands dancing as if nothing was happening, no flags permitted, no politics mentioned. I hadn't come to party, just got the ticket from a friend who lives next door and who needs us to make sure no drugged up idiots invade her farm. I walked the festival grounds in the morning, scared and sad that there are so many people who don't seem to care, who just fill their privileged lives with distractions. And then I saw that one tree had a small Palestinian flag tied to it, and it planted a seed in me. At least one person had passed here who cared, I wasn't all alone. It was that tiny flag on the tree that inspired my larger flag on the bridge. A small seed, a larger seed, a mass of people shouting "We don't want this anymore!"

So you can't quit your bullshit job because you need to bring food to the table. You cannot drop everything and become an underground fighter. You cannot hop onto a boat to bring actual relief to Gaza. You can't beat Trump, or Thiel, or their powerful international network of evil grifters who keep us poor and desperate. Not alone. Not all of us are born heroes, some of us will feel like criminals for tying a flag to a bridge. But we can say "I see this, too". And others will hear and see you and feel less alone, and maybe gain the courage to say "I don't want to exist anymore in a world like this." Saying it out loud even in the quietest of ways so others can hear it is the first step towards building a world we want to live in.

3. We are many and we will be more

The next tiny pathetic step is community. The grifters have us glued to social media, where we doomscroll and feel vaguely connected, but never seem to meet in real life anymore. We have to return to real community, to meeting in person, to being physically present. I heard of a few friends who meet on a field to bang pots as a form of protest. Another pathetic tiny thing that changes nothing - or does it? They meet on a field in the middle of nowhere because many of us are here as foreigners in a very conservative region and we are afraid to make too much noise and anger the locals. So we only dare to make a little noise. And yet, this pathetic tiny noise inspired me to raise my imperfect voice as well. Next time I will join them, and at some point we might find the courage to take our pots into town. I also decided to hold a knit-in for peace in a public place - a quiet protest of a few of us, another seed, another tiny croak of us quiet and scared people of softly saying "No".

I don't want to exist anymore in a world like this. But rather than desperately trying to be a "functional human being" in a dysfunctional world I will bring my crude flags noticed by nearly nobody and bang my pathetic pots in a field to invite others to join me. I will bring what I have available and what I feel brave enough to use because even the tiniest croak of protest is better than silence. There's only a few of us today. There's many more like us who do not want to exist in a world like this anymore. They will join us once they don't feel so alone anymore. We are many, and our feelings of despair are valid!

Sorry, it's in German, but hey, it's the full documentary. Not sure if a full English version can be found somewhere, it's really worth watching - quite uplifting, about why we should eat the rich, and about those who are still trying and sometimes succeed.

While browsing the fediverse I come across more and more accounts that seem ... a bit off, a little uncanny. The stuff they post seems random, their comments slightly weird. What's going on, is the fediverse being overrun by bots? Or am I as a fanatic anti-AI person just losing my mind and seeing the enemy everywhere?

I hate the fact that I now question every interaction that seems a bit off - it seems such a stupid waste of my time and I'm afraid I might just end up blocking real people who happen to express themselves in a strange way - as a neurodivergent person I know how bad I would feel about being ostracized as 'too strange to be real'. How would you handle this?

As I seem to encounter quite a few anarchists who just love to produce word salad, here's some grandmotherly words of advice. When you want to create a better world and you do so by writing, learn how to write in a way that is accessible. The people you are trying to reach might not have time to work through pages of word salad. The language you write in might not be their native language. They might not have any academic education. They might be dyslexic or have a short attention span.

It is tempting to use long words and sentences. You might be concerned that if you write in a simple way people will think your message is not true, or that your philosophy lacks depth, or even worse that someone else could think you are stupid. But in the worst case people will think none of those things because they can't be arsed to read beyond the first few words of your text in the first place, and will immediately move on to something more easy to read. Also, there's a big difference between Trump-level populism and accessible texts with substance.

Accessible texts with substance point towards some activity people can do in real life, some change they can bring about by doing a specific thing. Nobody cares if Anarcho-Capitalism or Anarcho-Coprophilism is better, but you can convince people to buy at a small grocery instead of a big supermarket. Don't tell them they should engage in mutual aid - instead give them ideas about how to help their neighbours.

I'm as guilty as the next person when it comes to posing as a smartass - but I try to fight it, because talking to each other to be heard is better than being very clever while nobody understands what we actually want to do.

When I open FB (I know I probably just shouldn't) and the first thing I see is misguided environmentalists trying to make their point with AI slop images I feel so lost and so tired. I keep explaining the problem, blank stares.

Just like when I warn people that fascist social media will just shut you down the moment they want (which seems to have happened yesterday as well with thousands of groups temporarily disappearing). Nothing but blank stares, because people are not aware of how technology works other than "I post my pictures on this website and others can see it".

Someone needs to burn the servers down because the general public will probably never understand how they enable destruction one prompt at a time.

I've been fermenting all sorts of stuff for a few years now and I'm quite open to experimentation to the point of being somewhat adventurous.

A jar of low sugar quince marmalade sweetened with grape juice (supermarket product, not homemade) started smelling slightly alcoholic and I filled it with water and left it on the counter to wash out later. Forgot it, found it again after a week and it was happily bubbling away. As I love fizzy drinks in summer I decided to feed it with sugar and bits of lemon and ginger and keep it going. It now lives in my fridge and provides one fresh drink a day.

No adverse effects (so far) and I'm very pleased with my new fermenting friend, but I'm curious about what it is. It doesn't grow a scoby, it's most likely not kombucha. The bottom of the jar has a cloudy layer which seem to be the remains of the marmalade. Ginger bug? Something else?

God is good, the devil sucks, all cops are bastards

This will be the fourth garden I'll leave before the harvest. The first two times my heart was utterly broken. I 'had' lots of land, and then just before a rich harvest my life would turn upside down and I left. The third garden I started out of an inner need to garden, I didn't care anymore who would eat what I planted and really started to understand that land is not to be owned, but cared for.

Currently I'm renting a small house without garden and went to help friends in their gardens for a while, but it's not the same as planting and caring for your plants right where you live. I found out that behind my house is a tiny, neglected, rubble-filled backyard, and today I turned two piles of rubble into two raised beds.

Not really a balcony, but small scale zero budget gardening. I felt so hopeless this morning with all the shit going on in the world, and I feel so much better now. If I leave here before harvest my friends hopefully will come and eat everything!

https://ibb.co/W47J9kmz

https://ibb.co/jZgKT579

Whatever happened to this market?

Thanks to some of you commenting about how you like reading my small chronicles of our local market economy I feel like I have to write something, but it's hard to put down. It's been a while and there have been so many twists and turns.

So just a few days before market 2 bf and I fell out, badly. The organizing activities we manage to brew up in our free times might paint us as enlightened, calm, peaceful and kind individuals. Which we are, until we're not. It started as a discussion about some shade to cover the market square. Before we knew it we were at bf jumping ship and me standing there with the market, having to decide whether to cancel it or continue.

It didn't take me that long to decide, it's a community market, there's been a few people who consistently helped - the right way to do things seemed to assemble them, tell them what happened and ask them if they want to continue supporting it. And so, suddenly, the market team was a small group, discussing together whether the market should happen, and how. But not just the market found support, also I found a temporary place to stay, people offering shoulders to cry on and breakfast and advice. Must I mention that the car broke down at the same time? It gave me an excellent opportunity to walk everywhere for a few days and ponder about the future.

The organizing itself didn't really need much more work, all we needed was to hang up signage, receive people and tell them where to put their stands, and let the market unfold. There was however some thunderstorm brewing at same time and we started following the forecast - orange warning, hailstorms, strong winds. There was a serious risk of damage to people and stuff. In the last hours the heavy storm turned away to elsewhere (some weather magic by the local witches might have been involved) and we decided to go ahead.

On the market day itself I was at same time numb and miserable, so pleased the market was still alive, and determined to enjoy and treat myself. On the first market I didn't even have time to sample all the goodness people brought in! You could get massages, eat vegan, vegetarian and local food, buy plants and crafts and second hand goods, leave your kids in the kid's area ... it was relatively quiet because of the bad weather forecast but there was enough life to make it worthwhile for all.

The friendly, not too hot but dry weather window lasted for exactly the market. It was me and my kid who made sure everything was back in place and clean, in a downpour of rain, after everybody else had gone home. And so endeth the second market, very film noir, very wet and dark.

All while I was left to handle things in the foreground, the bf did the right thing and forwarded all relevant emails and phone calls in the background. Most of the explosiveness of our falling out was ultimately old traumas colliding, and it didn't take us long after the market to carefully reapproach, find a helpful and qualified member of the community to moderate a first talk between us, and organize our life together in a slightly different way. Relationship dynamics, reemergence of old patterns and the struggle against the system in our heads is a long story for another day.

As the rotten parts fall away the market emerges in a new form: as a true community project. A meeting is planned to determine how this group project should work - and already, because nothing is properly defined yet, first frictions have appeared. The next challenge will be learning how to work in a group, and we will need all the good spirits who care to help this little market!

AI has gobbled up my work since the beginning of this year and there is no more funding for the market. We can pay for the next insurance, that's it. Some village politicians are keen to have a nice market like ours and seem to be much more willing to finance fun stuff like a bouncy castle and musicians, so we might have to move at some point, or even become nomadic. If you happen to know a friendly millionaire who would spend a few peanuts of 400€ per month to keep this thing happening, please send them our way.

And now go and organize some markets, even though it puts your relationships and cars at risk. It's worth it, trust me.

The crumbles

Out here where we are organizing our market, Southern Europe middle of nowhere, many of the original inhabitants have left decades ago and there are many empty houses and abandoned farms. There has been a steady influx of foreigners in the last decades, many of them seeking refuge from something, from unsafe conditions in their countries of origin, rigid school systems and overcontrolling state powers, poverty, high property prices in their home countries, war, disconnect from nature, pollution, persecution.

With the summer heat returns the fear of wildfires - every year some part or another of the landscape catches fire, houses and farms and sometimes animals and people burn. It would help if more people lived here and cared for the land, and if the local authorities didn't encourage the planting of pine and eucalyptus monocultures. There is an underlying feeling that everyone would rather be left alone by all the rules and regulations that stifle each and every activity, but some facade has to be kept up towards an increasingly absent central power, and lets face it, some rules and regulations keep the more desperate from wrecking the last bit of landscape that is left.

As for absent power, I'm still trying to create an association, but nobody of the places supposedly available seem to want to do it. The only powers always ready to become active are those authorized to collect fines! I've spent the last couple of days somewhat enraged about that, which isn't very healthy. The second edition of our market is coming along nicely however, with a collective spamming of posters on every surface in this and the neighbouring towns, and sharing it on social media. The old plus some new stallholders are eager to arrive, we are growing the number of stalls quite significantly ...

In the background, people are coming together and approach us about sharing costs and give advice around cutting costs. I'm not pushing any of it, it's still mainly our investment and it's worth it. People will be more comfortable to step in when we get a monthly event going, and we'll continue as long as we aren't going hungry - and there seems to be plenty of food everywhere we turn up, so it might be a while.

Which brings me back, again and again, to the idea of value. In the case of people living here, more and especially younger people provide value. So the different refugees and especially their children are quite welcome. There's language courses to help people fit in, bureaucracy seems to have a somewhat loose interpretation to help people settle around here, and we have heard many times from locals how happy they are that some life returns to the region! The return of life means the necessary work gets done. In our case, we couldn't get our car repaired. In fact, we were forced to organize the whole first edition of the market with a tiny microcar which is falling in pieces. When it didn't pass the inspection we realized getting mad at the mechanic wasn't helping, so we just made a deal and sent our resident young person to go do something useful and help the man in his workshop (or: sacrifice my firstborn to get my car fixed, depends on your perspective). I find that everybody wins, for now. No money involved, but value created. A friend seems to have been helping out in the local cheese factory and I'm considering it as well, as a learning experience and to support the tiny local business.

These developments slot in nicely with some ideas another friend had about a 'school of volunteers' where youngsters would be getting to know different eco-projects and businesses of the region. It satisfies a need: the tiny family businesses we have around here can't always afford permanent staff but often might need some people who can jump in and help. And also, people don't want to do 8 hours of the same, every day. My coop ideas are very much also connected to these issues. So this working without the formal form of cooperative is maybe even better, more flexible. Make it part of the culture again.

This invites to re-inspect my perception of value and the many ways value does not have to relate to money. To let go, at least for a while, of the idea that money provides safety, and welcome the idea of community providing it instead, and find out together how we would shape this community to be comfortable for the many different people, cultures and ideas that it is made up of. And how to integrate this manifold human community into the larger landscape of non-humans and make this into an abundant circle of life. For this to happen we might have to treat our money in more unconventional ways, to not hold on to it too much and invest in community wherever we can. And invest in handmade stuff, because handmade craft slows down the stream of resources. So it's important that the market be for crafts and second hand things and locally grown and made food - these being things of real value compared to cheaper, mass-produced stuff.

Happening as well: Yesterday I got myself a mild sunstroke walking way too fast and far through this landscape I love, with a rather tougher-than-me group of elderly locals, but it was worth it because someone explained me how to make a brush from a local plant. The feverish hours spent in a dark room afterwards were invaded by ideas of how to foster the mushroom-growing capabilities of ants for easier mushroom cultivation. Yay for multicultural and interspecies community, and a liveable future for all!

Towards the second edition

After the first market being a success we felt we had to continue building on what we started. So we called a meeting with the townhall again to confirm a second date. They took their time to receive us (we should have been professional and book the market aftermath meeting beforehand) and confirmed our date. And then, after we immediately started distributing the information and receiving stallholder registrations, unconfirmed it again two days later because apparently we are too close to a voting booth, which the law doesn't permit.

We sent them a rather unkind email. Had a somewhat heated meeting, and changed date, and then scrambled to let everyone know. One of the townhall people was really quite offended and emotional about the fact that we questioned their commitment, and I'm still confused by the fact how much emotion we stirred up with that. It's like they are completely out of their depth and make things up as they go, and they look mostly overwhelmed - not that different from what we are doing. I guess we were actually lucky that whoever came to shove that law into their faces didn't decide to wait with it until a day before the market.

We are, so far, still losing money. I'll have time to come up with a collection of things to sell to support ourselves in this one, among ram pumps, trees and used goods. We also had a long discussion about the real worth of things, worth that has nothing to do with money. The seeds that are created even when you fail, the young people inspired to try and create something one day, the connections created with these events. It's all worth it.

This is the first time the townhall confirmed not only that creating an association would be useful, but also that (and how) we could ask for financial support, and that they will support us in doing so. I feel we are now in the category of 'annoying but useful' and we also meet a lot of people who we might tag in a similar way. We know they are ultimately aligned with what we want (create a resilient community in our region) but the way they do things doesn't align perfectly with our ideas. We'd rather limit our exposure to them if we can or don't really think their methods work, but they are welcome anyway. That's the heart of community, especially a multicultural one - the daily work of getting along also with those whose goals are close enough. It means people need to have space to get out of each other's way, and that one also has to maintain a fierce stance for tolerance and being non-judgemental while keeping one's own integrity intact.

We are learning a lot about different cultures. Someone invited themselves over for coffee in a rather abrupt way, and there I was confused, scrambling to produce some coffee in my unprepared kitchen! Just to find out it's more of a figure of speech somewhere else as a way to ask if the person is prepared for someone else to pop by - actual coffee not necessarily expected.

And so edition two of the market is on the way, with a lot of friends from the last time getting ready to appear. This time the anxiety is way lower. There's so much less to organize, we'll have electricity and shade, according to the townhall.

Meanwhile our market activities are just one of many little things happening around here and bringing people together. The cultural bandwidth of events we've visited only in the last month is making us a little dizzy. And each of the places we visit brings another element to our mix. We went, pretty much in one row, to: a business-y and cautious kind of meeting with people from a large local eco-tourism project who would like to hold our event on their (beautiful but not public) terrain, the weekly clothes-farmers-food-everything market where I buy my sourdough bread, a rainbow gathering held by neighbours who will grace our next market with a vegetarian food stand, a quite surprising circus performance in the next town's market hall, a renaissance fair ... it's nice and diverse here already with a lot of inspiring stuff being created, and we're surfing through all of this inviting everyone to the market.

We have help from people distributing flyers now. We've convinced the right people to run food stands. Might be that on the next market we just can lean back and enjoy.

Fun fact: I was super pleased to hear that locals call our market the 'Come-ons market', 'Come-on' being a slightly derisive term for expats, and an excellent word-play with 'Commons'. Couldn't have come up with it myself. And I really like how the organization is playing out, with the right people already in place ready to advertise our event, and not just us this time - so it is turning into a multicultural Commons Market just as planned.

As composting enthusiasts who want to build a project around compost, we had been intrigued about the waste ever since the council had announced their new bio waste collection program and advertised everywhere for people in town to collect and deliver theirs. They handed out buckets, a few containers appeared in two neighbourhoods, and it had something to do with the sustainable development goals.

But no composting facility anywhere in the council, so we asked around and finally got hold of the right person. Found out the waste is carried a hundred kilometers away to a huge central facility, once a week.

Now we need to find out if they let us do better than that?