Day 1,575 – Something has Changed

I have always been charitably described as a cynic. Before beginning Zoloft I was also alternatively described as dark, moody, and a “brooding asshole” by my closest friends.

Maybe because I’ve been off Zoloft for about 7 days now (yes my eyeballs make noise when i look left or right) and the latest installment of the chemical mood-buffer is receding, i feel something in me has changed.

This change is very hard to describe. There are times i feel the change has already occurred but is only being revealed in flashes. Other times i feel that the change is still happening in stages like a ratchet and pawl.

What is this change? The largest recognizable component is a total inability to stomach hypocrisy and a realization hypocrisy, while everywhere, is thickening like some gelatinous goo around the surface of the planet engulfing everything.

I find Urban Dictionary’s definition (and less common spelling) helpful in the political sense:

What Democracy turns into when all of the politicians in your country are liars.
When no party/President that wins the election manages to keep its/his own ideology, and instead, keeps changing it every time it/he feels like it, that’s no democracy. That’s hypocracy.

I suspect the two prime causes of this change are my previous job experience at SOU and turning 50. The job for introducing me to a level of incompetence and stark ugliness in leadership I never dreamed possible, and my birthday for reminding me there are certainly fewer days ahead than behind.

The job is thankfully behind me, but the other part is more difficult to navigate. I suppose taking a pasture management class now that, at the outset, asks a slew of questions about “why are you choosing this lifestyle” is well-timed. In my list of the top ten reasons i found myself including “to meet more people i’d like to emulate and fewer i’d like to kill” which, thus far, has happened. So I do feel i’m in the right place for some kind of mid-life crisis/re-examination/trajectory change.