FLemmingO

Triple my salary would be my minimum requirement to offset the additional freedom and lack of commute that I’d have to give up. I’d be spending less time with my family and I won’t give that up for anything less than triple my current pay.

There’s a church across the street from my home in a small rural town in Oklahoma. It sits completely empty except for about 90 minutes from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM when about 6 cars pull up into the parking lot and maybe 15 people saunter in for Sunday service after ringing a loud bell announcing to the whole neighborhood. None of these attendees live in the neighborhood I might add.

There are literally dozens of other churches just like it throughout the town. It blows my mind that a religion that claims to be about spreading the love of their savior and saving as many people as possible from literal damnation would let a resource like that go unused. They could have volunteers there every day of the week helping to improve the community and help people in need but they couldn’t care less.

It really is. So many times I have mentioned how great therapy has been for me and how glad I am that I found the right one for me, only to have people tell me they never would’ve taken me for someone who needed one. I always reply that it’s my firm belief that even the healthiest of mentalities can benefit from good therapy.

Sometimes I have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that if I never had depression I would be a fundamentally different person, and there are good qualities of mine that I don’t believe I would have acquired without that exact factor in my life. Like yes I would prefer an existence free of the pain depression has put me through but that person would not be me. Living with depression is a fact of my life. There’s a lot of help out there and I have benefited greatly from it but it will to some extent always be an ongoing process.

It’s so hard to find friends after a big move. I moved to another state in 2021 and still haven’t made any friends other than people my wife was already friends with. Although I still struggled with depression even when I had a big friend group. Affordable mental health support has done the most for me. Having the opportunity to talk to an amazing therapist every week for more than a year has done absolute wonders for my outlook.

That said, I still live with depression. I’m on a medication that helps me have fewer of my worse days and more of my better ones but that doesn’t always work and it’s only a supplement to regular effective therapy itself.

My musical tastes vary from rock and it’s many subgenres and off shoots to dozens of genres of EDM (mainly Progressive House, Trance, Techno, Psytrance, Dubstep, and Drum & Bass). I have a Spotify library exceeding 12k tracks.

Some of my favorite acts in no particular order include The Offspring, Rise Against, Pearl Jam, Ghost, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Avenged Sevenfold, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Breaking Benjamin, Billy Talent, Linkin Park, Paramore, Deadmau5, Feed Me, Kill The Noise, Liquid Stranger, Dance With The Dead, Ghostland Observatory, Rezz, Eric Prydz, Infected Mushroom, Heatbeat, Death On The Balcony, Hernan Cattaneo, and Lee Burridge just to name a few.