Relaxing and kids don’t really go together, regardless us adults need a break so we’re looking for a staycation place that ..,:

• not too far away from Victoria (2 hr drive is ok)
• is kid friendly (for 3 year old and under)
• has some amenities like hot tub or sauna etc
• is close to nature and walks
• Bonus: I don’t want to worry about food so would love a buffet but know this one is likely unrealistic

My spouse has heard some bad reviews about Tigh Na Mara, so we’d like to avoid it (ie one of them around cleanliness and their pools which came from a guy who does that for a living himself). What other options are there? We’re hoping to go in the summer months for 3-4 days.

Life comes in many flavours, and each day we face many questions. Some of these questions are judgements. And some of these judgements involve others in significant and meaningful ways. On the one hand, we seek to satisfy our personal needs -- self-determination -- while maintaining a sense of virtue -- compassion and justice. For many, there is too much injustice and suffering just to ignore. On the other hand, balancing the needs of us and them beckons honest appraisal of situations and people. But where and how should our finger be pointed?

Core psychology of blame

Among the very earliest struggles in a person's life is the process of ego development. In its simplest, ego is about separating good from bad, self from other. Various theories and models strive to explain the ego, or its development, from various perspectives. For the purposes here, I will be referencing object relations theory, which is part psychoanalytic psychology and deals with very early development, starting at birth. A few things will be slightly simplified to keep the text concise.
Within this theory, the first several months involve what is termed the paranoid-schizoid position. The "schizoid" aspect refers to a cognitive-emotional process known as splitting. This is where external objects, including people, are split into opposing mental parts -- to form part objects, or the "good object" version and the "bad object" version of each meaningful external object or phenomenon. For example, when the caregiver is gratifying to the infant, that part object is the "good caretaker"; and when not so gratifying, that caretaker is the "bad caretaker". At this stage of development and understanding, these two "part objects" are not seen as from the same source. Rather, each is a separate thing appearing and disappearing as circumstances and feelings change. The key word here is separation, which we will come back to later.
The other aspect of the paranoid-schizoid position -- the "paranoid" aspect -- refers to a curious side effect of splitting everything into "good" and "bad". Because each "part object" is either all good, or all bad, and because the appearance and disappearance of these mysterious entities is more-or-less out of control, the infant begins to resent and fear the bad objects that keep happening. That is, the baby hates the bad objects but loves the good objects. This is perhaps the very first stage of moral awareness -- raw, albeit mistaken judgement; love the good; hate the bad; pure, uninhibited attraction and repulsion. As a result, or side effect, of these negative or aggressive feelings toward "the bad", the baby may fear possible persecution, invoking paranoia. Strange though that may sound, there is a bit more to it.
Splitting, as between the mentioned "good" and "bad" objects, is only half the story. The other half of splitting is between "good self" and "bad self". That is, because in the paranoid-schizoid position, objects are temporary and impermanent, so too is the self temporary and fleeting. Moreover, the self is either in comfort, or in distress, giving either "good self" or "bad self" -- depending on circumstance. Since the "good self" appears with the "good object", and likewise the "bad self" with the "bad object", the child fears the appearance of the "bad object" even more. This is because its presence entails essentially collapse of the previous self-concept, as if to enter a realm of deserved persecution for being the "bad self" -- and hence the emergence of paranoia.
On an interesting aside, this manner of judging objects and selves as good or bad based solely on whether one is currently in comfort or pain is the essence of Stage 1 in Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development. This is a theory on the progression of individuals throughout life in moral reasoning. Stage 1, termed obedience and punishment orientation, judges those in trouble or pain as inherently bad. In many cases, this view basically blames the victim. Further, this type of reasoning is essentially the basis for the "might makes right" mindset seen in some cases of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). One thing to keep in mind is that we all start there, but not everyone stays there. In this way, having crude moral reasoning later in life is effectively a sign of delayed or regressed development, much like a disability -- ie. "morally disabled".

Completing the person

Eventually, the child will reach a point in development where objects become whole and persistent, able to have simultaneously negative and positive qualities. Objects or people may take on accounts, or balances, allowing for consideration of simple reciprocity, including guilt and reparation. Self and caregiver become distinct entities, where "good" self is no longer lost each time caregiver is absent or busy. Assuming successful progression, blame and judgement is no longer split dichotically between two extremes. Otherwise a new type of splitting is come, where objects and entities, though whole and persistent, are either idealised or devalued.
An important key trend exists between consecutive steps of ego development. This is the trend of expanding persistence and relatedness. In the part-object stage, objects appear and vanish -- some good, some bad. These raw appearances are neither persistent, nor related. In the whole-object stage, objects become persistent, although at first not really related. Because of this initial lack of relation, the secondary type of splitting -- idealisation and devaluation -- is still likely. Basically, since one person or object is fundamentally unrelated to another, including the self, there is "no harm" in seeing one as all good, and another as all bad. Without a stabilising relation, moral judgements can be whimsical yet extreme. A person or object may alternate between being embraced and discarded, depending on present feelings or arrangements. But what makes a stabilising relation?
In general, stabilising relations develop naturally through observation and reason. For example, a caregiver may through time be taken as an intrinsic part of one's need for support. Or a sibling may eventually be seen as fundamentally similar and related. But the building of these relations, or attachments, can be hindered by certain experiences or feelings. For instance, an unstable or unavailable caregiver may leave a child feeling resentment, shame, or guilt. These feelings may then get in the way of building an emotional bond. The resulting lack of security, mixed with possible shame or guilt for not being good enough, may lead to maladaptive and unstable boundaries and self-definition. Some common results are narcissism and borderline personality -- the former as an escape mechanism from feelings of inadequacy, and the latter as unstable border-lines between what is embraced, and what is rejected. These early childhood misgivings can then live on subconsciously, infiltrating the psyche and its future engagements.

Competition and judgement

While the capacity for blame and hate may emerge, as described above, from fundamental urges of attraction and repulsion -- mixed with innate capacity for making inference -- there is another powerful instinct at play. Complex social animals have a built-in game of gene-selection and mate-selection. This game relies on a simple heuristic, or objective -- form competitive hierarchies, and select those at the top. The evolutionary assumption is that competition filters out less desirable code. Without reflection, this pre-configured notion may be taken at face value, often in fact elevated -- whether spoken or kept silent -- to something of religious adherence. But is the argument sound?
In simple times, back in the tribe, individuals tended to grow up closely-knit and fairly uniformly. Regardless which parents one had, pretty much everyone had access to the same quality of food, healthcare, and education. Tools and other amenities could readily be made or obtained by any abled body, often with only modest effort. As a result, there was, compared to modern times, an extremely even playing field. Very little interfered with the above premise that those who achieved success in social hierarchy likely had something special inside. Sure, luck still played a part, but that part was not only far less significant than today, but also far more visible for those of simple tribes. In probably most cases, everybody knew when someone had encountered bad fortune, as individual stories were less hidden.
In the current age, however, personal merit is vastly more obscured and mangled by deceptive forces. The range of disparity in childhood resources and care, the long duration of schooling needed to be competitive, and the sheer price of admission into money-making pursuits, completely destroy any legitimacy the heuristic of selection by social hierarchy may previously have had. Luck may have played a part back then, but today the part played by the lottery of placement into a particular family, time, and place is riddled with inequity. On top of all that, the behaviours and exploits that set one person atop the next are lost from sight through the complex labyrinth of time, legalese, and the unfathomable size of modern society. Hence, the basis of soundness behind judging merit on personal outcome is no longer something that can be supported with any honesty. To praise or blame based on social status and wealth is to partake in folly.

Entity and arrangement defined

Entities are mental objects, and their social accounts, pertaining to people, groups, aggregates, and other moral agents. I say mental objects for two basic reasons. One, individuals and groups change through time. As the saying goes:

"A person never steps into the same river twice; for on the second occasion, one is neither the same person, nor is it the same river" (paraphrased) ~ Heraclitus of Ephesus.

Two, while we may posit that physical substance seems to exist out there, beyond the mind, we nevertheless must work within our mental model, or worldview, when considering those entities and other things of material or mental reality. Hence, entities and objects can be cognised, or considered, solely as mental objects. This phenomenon of the mental becomes even more apparent when we consider the nature of not only being, but identity, character, and personal story. None of these, from what I can tell, can rightly be said to exist outside the mind. Each has arbitrary, situation-specific, and continually shifting boundaries and connotations.
Arrangements, in contrast, are sets of objects; entities; their relative positions; their internal configurations; and their relations and interactions. Arrangements are hence the frameworks in place either materially or logically between and within entities and or objects. Common examples include law, culture, contract, education, and social hierarchy -- but also the physical placement of people and things.
Not surprisingly, the arrangements in place have substantial influence on the outcomes for individuals and society. The same person lowered into two different cultures and circumstances can be expected to have a different time. Education, ideas, values, struggles, and relationships may all be completely changed. The combinations of butterfly effect, disparity of opportunity, and idiosyncratic accident leave open the door for a wide variety of possibility.

Splitting and blaming the entity

Before talking about what to blame, or how to blame it, we might consider some phenomena which may influence one's ability to make sound judgement. As discussed previously, early development can play a big part in both the way one perceives and understands the world, and also the way one feels about, and hence reacts to, situations and challenges within the world. So let us look at some such phenomena.
Splitting, in the post-infancy sense, is the viewing of mental objects -- including and especially people -- as either idealised all good, or devalued all bad. The primary hypothesis goes something along the lines that a child who felt insufficiently loved or attended during infancy and early childhood may develop an internalised sense of unworthiness -- perhaps shame or guilt. In simple terms, the child may internalise a judgement of "not good enough". Since early, particularly pre-linguistic experiences tend to be deeply-seated and hard-conditioned, the person later in life may not only have little if any recall of such experience, but likely has little ability to reflect or challenge the resulting feelings or cognitive distortions. Basically, the only remnant clearly visible may be the feelings and intuitions themselves -- sense of shame, guilt, and never being good enough. However, as with other inescapable negative feelings, the child or later person is prone to forming habits of escape. Most notably here, the person may partake in defence mechanisms, or unconscious patterns of perception and thinking that seek to turn off or escape uncomfortable or stressful cognitions.
Projection is among the most used defence mechanisms. It involves taking an unwanted feeling or judgement, and throwing it upon someone or something else. The idea is to distance oneself from such negative connotations. In the case of internalised shame or guilt of being "not good enough" during childhood, the person is likely to begin casting this judgement upon others. Unreasonable or unattainable standards may be adopted. The world itself may be viewed as inherently broken or untenable. In the case of splitting specifically, black-or-white, all-or-none thinking may be employed to polarise objects or people -- including oneself -- into all good or all bad -- idealisation or devaluation. This type of projection sorts others into something of angels and demons. Furthermore, as in borderline personality disorder, these dichotic judgements may switch regularly depending on current affairs. The key thing to remember here is that projection is done to escape unfaceable feelings or judgements about oneself. Use of this defence mechanism may shift blame from self to another, often in a way that is difficult or impossible for the user to see.
More broadly, splitting belongs to a class of phenomena known as cognitive distortions. In addition to all-or-none thinking, cognitive distortions include overgeneralising, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, exaggeration, perfectionism, personalisation, always being right, and labelling of others. Obviously these all have significant implications for how one judges others, and indeed how one places blame. For the discussion here, let us talk about one more of these.
Personalisation is when a person takes the blame personally, regardless what external factors may be at play. This style of attribution is inherently self-deprecatory. Alternatively, blame may be placed entirely on another person or group. The distortion here is not that blame is occurring, but that the object is always a conventional moral agent, such as a human or AI. Essentially, an individual with this style of attribution may have an irrational tendency to place blame on agents, rather than circumstances. The trick is understanding why this happens.
As it turns out, the psychology behind placing blame disproportionately on people and other agents, rather than arrangements, is driven by the instinct of social hierarchy. Like brought up earlier, people have a tendency to compare and compete, judging one another into hierarchies of better and worse -- more or less worthy. The more insecure a person feels, or the more internalised shame or sense of inadequacy one has, the more the person may be compelled to cast blame on others. Put simply, insecurity activates the instinct of social hierarchy.
There are some noteworthy side effects to the habit of blaming the agent. One is scapegoating, or the projection of a group's fears and insecurities onto an external object. In scapegoating, the object chosen is often little, if at all, related to the underlying problem or dysfunction. Rather, the group seeks to unload its insecurity onto an unlucky target. This behaviour is much like that done in narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). One might say that groups too, not just people, can have NPD. One common target of scapegoating is minorities, of pretty much any type, who are often blamed for internal inadequacies of the majority regime. Another side effect of blaming the agent is kicking the dog, or chain reactions of blame shifting where each rung of the social hierarchy blames the next rung, all the way to the dog. Similar to scapegoating, kicking the dog picks a target generally unable to defend itself. This style of attribution, moreover, is contagious within organisations, hindering legitimate consideration of how the true underlying issues can best be resolved.

False object of blame

A curious distortion of interest is blindly taking the mental as fact. In the extreme, there is a phenomenon known as psychic equivalence. This is common in children, where the imagined monster under the bed is believed surely to exist. The line between mental and external is still thin. While most older individuals are beyond such explicit equivalence, we nevertheless have no other option for understanding reality than what our mind beholds. Whether for positive or negative, when we see or imagine someone, we are never seeing the real person. What we witness is our mental model, or mental object, of the other. The same goes for their view of us. When they behold us, they are really beholding someone else -- a construct of their imagination. Likewise, when we judge or blame another, we are really blaming someone else -- a monster of our own creation. Sometimes it can help to remember that in our mental, we are all mental.

Another defence mechanism

Aside from cognitive distortions, another key issue stands in the way of finding truth. In order to resolve deeply-seated emotional baggage, that baggage has to be opened. Yet doing so can be both painful and confusing. The mind has another trick up its sleeve to avoid facing the rain -- intellectualisation. Many have heard of rationalisation, or the making up of good-sounding stories to explain otherwise irrational or emotion-based actions and choices. Intellectualisation is related, but distinct. Instead of making up stories to seem more rational, intellectualisation makes up complex frameworks and red herrings to distract oneself and others from getting too close to the underlying feeling. Just like for splitting, the usual root cause is believed to be insecure attachment during infancy and early childhood. The result, especially later in life, is the excessive overreliance on logic and complex frameworks to avoid looking inside toward emotion. Reason becomes a comfortable hideout from hideous feeling. This disposition prevents proper reflection, making it hard or impossible to stop idealising and devaluing others. After all, one cannot stop spilling pain until one finds the source of that pain.

Relation to free will

The notion of free will comes in many definitions. These can get technical. But one fairly common theme is what they seek to support -- often some type of personal, or entity-centric, responsibility or blame. Regardless whether logically sound, the pursuit is in many cases a rationalisation of the instinctual and emotional urges of social hierarchy and ego defence. Essentially, many debates about free will are really struggles, or disagreements, on the nature of blame, and to where it should aim. In general, the belief in free will -- regardless the definition chosen -- is argued in support of some type of entity attribution. Likewise, the disbelief in free will is usually argued in support of system attribution, or blaming the way society or culture is structured. A person may choose a definition specifically to assert the desired end -- a psychological phenomenon called motivated reasoning. This text will avoid choosing a definition, as the underlying principles of behaviour are more important.
A less known paradox exists within the bounds of psychological agency. As is regularly discussed in certain circles of spirituality, there exists a spectrum of self-boundary between immediate, local, relative and timeless, non-local, absolute. This mental state of contraction or expansion depends in part on the grasping or release of fear and attachment. For those unfamiliar, the felt sense of personal agency -- sometimes called doership -- and one's associated beliefs about personal causation, are prone to change, or shift, depending on the present level of anxiety -- especially social and existential anxiety. There are two key aspects related to the sense of being in control.
The first aspect of interest is that of causal scope, or how far we trace the causes and influences behind any given event or decision. For example, as I type this, among the most immediate, or smallest causal scopes, is that of my finger pressing a key. Moving toward greater scope, we may consider that the arm is moving the finger. Further, of course, one might say the body is doing the typing. But the scope need not end there. We can trace back through the causal chains, finding all manner of influence. After all, why do I care about this? What social factors and life experiences influenced this cause? The more immediate the causal scope, the longer and more encumbered the causal chains. Hence, even though when afraid we may focus on the more immediate, hence feeling more in direct control, the more our felt boundaries of self and causality contract, the more short-sighted, distracted, and materially-bound we are. The paradox is in the inverted pyramid of influence atop our actions.
The second aspect relates to impulse and desire versus self-control and composure. Human desire may be divided broadly into basic animal instinct and social image. In Freudian terms, these would be id and ego. The former is often viewed as impulsive or animalistic; the latter as controlled and composed. A meaningful portion of pro-free will arguments seems to equate or compare the composure and planning of socially-conscious actions and choices as representative of the essence of "free will". That is, more "controlled" or deliberate actions were exercising greater free will than their more impulsive or animalistic counterparts. But is this assessment sensible?
On the one hand, being more socially aware likely helps to prevent being manipulated or impeded by others. Most would probably agree thus far. But on the other hand, the more we care about fitting in, or otherwise playing the game of social hierarchy, the more we submit ourselves to social norms and other hive behaviours. Essentially, the more we care about image, the more we let society control us. Despite this emotional tether, those with the biggest egos often proclaim the greatest sense of self-determination. Certainly one could argue that being on top of the hierarchy usually entails greater access to social amenities, some of which offering greater freedom. But there may be some right reservations here. Firstly, the enhanced freedom of high status often comes with enhanced fitment and scrutiny into the externally-defined social mould. This is not always the case, as for example with dictators. But secondly, the vast majority of those playing the ego game are neither in positions of status and power, nor emotionally secure enough to go their own way toward personal happiness. Perhaps most prominently, for most social animals, the hive provides only minimal amenity, and maximal loss of autonomy. Yet the internalised ego and self-concept obscure this reality by making cultural, emotional artifacts of socialisation -- especially during childhood -- appear as self-chosen. The person is thus a product of upbringing, but because these aspects of conditioning are so deep and unconscious, their effects are simply taken for granted as part of who one is. Hence, a second paradox exists in that what may appear as evidence for free will -- ego and composure -- is in fact the very thing enacting the long-seated will of the hive.
On a different note of the free will debate, there seems to be a phenomenon somewhat like "free will of the gaps", where any unknown of psychology or physics is received wholeheartedly as evidence for freedom. While no doubt one may never really know, particularly when stuck in the subjective mind-box, one might consider the effect of splitting, or black-and-white thinking. This habit may, without enough reflection, colour one's assessment of personal agency as either wholly existing, or wholly absent. This is not to say undue burden and other explicit interference is unregarded, but more that even the mere existence of randomness or unpredictability may be taken as sufficient reason to ward off the behavioural influences and effects known by modern psychology. Remember that splitting is driven by egoic insecurity, and that ego has vested interest in building the narrative which best places oneself in the social hierarchy of the mind. Impulsive or controlled, what we choose is there to satisfy instinct, whether animalistic, or socially-focused.

Blaming the arrangement

On the other side of inferred causation -- after instinct -- we have experience, conditioning, and circumstance. Experience and conditioning are carry-overs from past arrangement while circumstance reflects the present arrangement. For simplicity, I will place all three simply under arrangement. To borrow from earlier:

Arrangements ... are sets of objects; entities; their relative positions; their internal configurations; and their relations and interactions. Arrangements are hence the frameworks in place either materially or logically between and within entities and or objects. Common examples include law, culture, contract, education, and social hierarchy -- but also the physical placement of people and things.

With this definition in mind, what then does it mean to blame the arrangement, and what benefit does so doing provide?
First, let us consider the standard Western approach. When we blame the entity, we are accomplishing three fundamental ends:

1. declaring a point of causal significance;
2. downgrading social status;
3. offloading correction;

On the first point, blaming the entity cuts off past influences, including deficiencies and inequalities in access to essential resources like health, respect, education, and experience. One might wonder why respect is included here. But remember the types of issue that arise from internalised shame, guilt, and feelings of inadequacy. These live on subconsciously, causing non-obvious impairments in judgement and performance. Plus they harm health and performance through elevated stress hormones.
On the second point, blaming the entity lowers its public appraisal, thus cutting off access to the types of resources just mentioned.
On the third point, blaming the entity places the burden of correction squarely on the already broken component. For simple matters like enforcing social norms or decency, this type of blame is probably effective in most cases. But when we start looking at bigger matters, like health, education, intelligence, self-restraint, and general performance, the idea of forcing the suboptimal party to fix itself starts to break down. All these matters are heavily influenced by external circumstance through time. So telling the person to fix the resulting dysfunction is like telling them to rewrite their past environment, including their upbringing. Moreover, those from broken pasts are much more often the least supplied -- in both resource and knowhow -- to make things better.
And this brings us to blaming the arrangement. If instead of burdening and downgrading the unfortunate entity, we recognise the conditions of success and failure, we can apply legitimate effort toward enacting a better future. Obviously society as a whole is far better equipped to improve not only the outcome of tomorrow, but the conditions of today. Some of us, by chance, receive the winning hand. This may be in genetics, family configuration, area of schooling, or maybe just missing detrimental accidents and injuries. What sense does it make to hoard the helpings of fate, thus preventing the wealth of shared development and growth? In a world literally brimming with technological advancement, is it really better for the majority to live polarised as minority winners and majority losers?

Arguments

One might argue that blame and praise are natural and effective tools for motivation and modification of behaviour. Natural though they may be, these tools are premised on the limited knowledge and resources of tribal past. Like using a hammer to insert a screw, messy tools ought to be reserved for desperate times only. Modern medicine, psychology, and sociology offer a new toolbox, today readily available, for resolving problems with minimal collateral damage. True, not everyone has fair access to these modern amenities, and that is exactly why we need to stop blaming the victim. The technology is here. We simply need to open the gates.
Another common argument is that absent of pointing fingers, people would lose motivation, or stop caring. There may be some truth here. If we remove the whip from their backs, the slaves may begin to relax. But is that really a bad thing? Per-capita material output is already worlds higher due to automation and tooling. But artificial scarcity is brought in to "keep up the morale". This scarcity is largely in the form of wealth and income inequality, which ensure the true producers of wealth -- the workers -- are kept chasing their imagined carrot. The effect, in practice, is burnout and learned helplessness. The secondary effect is thus decreased performance, which is then "solved" with ever greater artificial scarcity, perpetuating the cycle of lies and suffering. Instead of entertaining a system of slavery with extra steps, why not more equally distribute the tools and technology of efficiency and success?
A darker argument that occasionally gets said out loud is that excessive competition and suffering help to weed out the less desirable traits. Often, it is proclaimed, nature wanted it that way. Ignoring the obvious lack of compassion, is this argument sound? The simple answer is no. The longer answer is not even a little. There are two main reasons. Firstly, the dirty game of filtering by social hierarchy was not only sloppy for its original environment of small tribes, but is completely unfit for modern, complex, abstract society. As explained previously, the legitimacy of individual merit is no longer known by fellow tribespeople. Wealth generation and extraction are too far removed and abstracted for proper outside judgement. And complex systems of power and propaganda further prevent equitable distribution of the fruits of labour. Secondly, the amount of time needed for such mechanisms of trait filtering to make an appreciable difference are substantially longer than the time from now before technology will allow superior selection of traits. There will be no need to compete in the sloppy ways of the past; nor any need to compete at all. The problem of selection is soon resolved. AI is entering the exponential phase. Petty and primitive worry about traits is irrelevant, for multiple reasons. If anything, those unable to understand this are unfit to be making policy decisions.
An argument which comes up enough to mention is that without blaming the entity, criminals would have free reign, able to do whatever they wanted without repercussions. This argument is missing something quite substantial about what is entailed by blaming the arrangement. Simply, if a certain person is believed to lack the self-control for certain situations or positions, that person will be kept away from those circumstances. A common example is driver's licensing, where one must earn the privilege by proving competence. And similarly to that, if someone is blatantly acting out and causing trouble, obviously they would be put somewhere safer. The key is rearranging circumstances as needed for best outcome while maintaining reasonable maximum personal autonomy -- without unnecessary harm, restraint, or loss of dignity. Yes, this is more involved in terms of resources and labour, but that is what technology is for. Naturally people prefer to have more privilege, and that alone is motivation enough to care.
And before someone accuses this approach of being or supporting a social credit system, we must make clear the difference. In social credit systems, blame is placed on the individual ! Sure, the factors used may involve family and acquaintance, but the burden of correction still goes to the person or small group. This is completely different from what is being proposed here.
A final argument relates to expense. On the surface -- especially from within the perspective of a system based on artificial scarcity and excessive wealth inequality -- the idea of having surplus means available for long-term planning may seem unfathomable. People's reluctance in this regard can be understood. But as mentioned above, we are presently, for presumably the first time in our recorded history, entering the age of exponential growth toward advanced artificial intelligence. Things are moving fast already, and both hardware and software are showing no slowing. If computational capacity continues to double regularly like it has for a long time now, we are probably looking at readily accessible post-human intelligence within five to ten years. Short of disaster or tyrannical interference, existing worries about labour and intellect shortage should soon evaporate. Yes, this time things are different. There is no known precedent.

Summary

Our natural instinct may tell us to blame the person. And Western culture may polarise this tendency to the extreme. But with a little understanding of why we feel the need to downsize others, we may be able to mend the splitting within us. Society may be designed around a game of hierarchy, but one need not partake. By knowing the factors that promote or inhibit wellbeing, and by using the knowledge and tools of modern, we can cast off the shallow assumptions behind us, to build something worth keeping. The first step is looking inside, to see the feeling that fears connection. Then we may look outside, to see that most are facing similar struggle. Situations are what make or break the person. If one should blame, blame the arrangement. The past may not be one for changing, but greater compassion today can find greater love tomorrow.

Population Explosion

A population explosion may be a step-up within the variety of people in a very explicit species.Population explosion offers rise to variety of social issues. It results in migration of individuals from rural areas to the urban areas inflicting the expansion of slum areas.
People board most insanitary and unhygienic conditions. state and economic condition cause frustration and anger among the educated youth.Overpopulation is related to negative environmental and economic outcomes starting from the impacts of over-farming, deforestation, and pollution to eutrophication and warming.
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Population Explosion
Without taking action currently, billions of individuals across the planet can face thirst, hunger, slum conditions and conflict in response to droughts, food shortages, urban sordidness, migration and ever depleting natural resources, whereas capability tries to catch up with demand. and therefore the projected growth in demand is staggering.

Effect of Population Explosion On setting

Following square measure the most effects of population explosion:

1.Problem of Investment Requirement

World population is growing at a rate of one.8 % each year. so as to attain a given rate of increase in per capita financial gain, larger investment is required. This adversely affects the expansion rate of the economy.

You Matter to Her in a Way No One Else Could
When you died and were reborn, you became divine. You were love, and you were violence, and you were my miracle. A God sprung forth from the decaying machinery of your broken body. Koishi, the God of Love and Hate—have mercy on us all.
Down by the shore of one of the great Lunar seas, there sat a lonely shack thatched with feathers. Inside, there was a massive wani no less than eight leagues long… and her infant son. To that crocodile who had never known true familial love, that delicate little child—who cooed and smiled at his mother’s every move—was nothing less than a miracle. Such a delicate life in her claws, who knew nothing but unconditional love for his mother—to the crocodile, it was proof there was still good in the world.
She was tired, but the crocodile forced herself to stay awake. There was something she needed to do—a memory she wanted to share with the most important person in her life.
So, with all the caution and tenderness in the world, she picked up her child with her jaws and coaxed him into her throat pouch. The newborn child, perhaps having some shared instinct with his crocodilian mother, did not cry or struggle. Instead, he let out a giggle as he poked his head out from between his mother’s jagged teeth. With a snort, the dragon climbed out of her thatch hut, and crawled along the shore, drawing a meandering trail in the sand as she went.
When she reached the point where the water came to shore in gentle waves, the crocodile set herself down in the sand, letting the waves wash in and lick at her child in gentle sprays. Her child giggled as the Lunar sea’s tickled him with its pure waters, and as he did, his mother couldn’t help but feel at peace.
Nothing. Nothing at all would be able to take this from her.
Her miracle.
Toyohime opened her eye to clear blue skies.
She flexed her fingers, and instead of feeling the cold steel of the ship she started to tear apart, she felt so many tiny pebbles, warmed by their time in the sun. Sand? She brought a fistful of the stuff into her vision, before letting it fall through her fingers and run down her face. It was too real to be a dream.
Toyohime sat up to observe her surroundings. As far as the eye could see, there were infinite stretches of sand collected into wind-swept dunes that obscured the horizon. It was hot. Unbelievably so for what was supposedly the void. She felt a gentle gust of warm wind pass by her and toss her hair. This place… this impossible place… was she dead?
She rose to her feet, fighting biting aches and pains from her battle not too long ago. No—not dead. Somehow, she had survived—there was no other explanation. And as she looked down to assess the damage she had taken, her suspicions were only confirmed. Her right arm was missing, and in its place was nothing but a healed stump. The nasty cuts and bruises she had received in the fighting had all healed over for the most part, the only evidence they happened at all being residual scars that were yet to disappear. The ground was covered in dried blood. She must’ve been laying here in this sand trap for hours.
She brought her free arm, completely healed, up to the general space where her right eye was to find an arrow still protruding from it. Wrapping her fingers around the shaft, Toyohime tore it out in a fluid motion, causing the wound to reopen and drip blood onto the sands below. But, through some miraculous action, it was mere moments before the flow of blood stopped as the wound healed shut. Her right eye was still inoperable, but this healing ability was downright uncanny, even for a god.
She flexed her fingers. It felt like there was a hole in her head from which memories and feelings poured out. The mystery of how she got here, who she killed, and whether she could even trust her own senses had no answer—Toyohime knew she herself had made sure of that. She supposed there was a good reason. The less she knew, the better. That was something she could trick herself into believing.
Though no matter how much she forced herself to forget, she had the horrible feeling she had done something unforgivable—something she would kill over. In a sea of atrocities however, she could hardly even begin to suppose what that might have been. Maybe the heat was starting to fry her brain.
After spending a few minutes snapping the arrows lodged in her body by their shafts, Toyohime looked to the horizon, and then up. Ahead, there was a massive sand dune, no less than five times her height, and beyond the crest—a black pillar of smoke. Toyohime was not alone.
As she made her way up the shifting incline, Toyohime got to thinking about her next course of action. If this wasn’t a hallucination, then it most certainly had to be some extension of Koishi's will. Land in an impossible space… the creation of something impossible like that could only be a factor of a deteriorating mind, or God. And Toyohime had no time to consider the possibility of a crumbling psyche—not when she had a duty left unfulfilled.
But then… that would mean this was the paradise of Koishi’s mind. Surely, by her side is where she would find her salvation. She had already come to terms with it—that there was nothing left for her in the old world. Koishi could pervert and corrupt reality in whatever twisted ways she wanted—as long as it was the creation of her heart, it would be sufficient. Everything beyond that was not worth saving to the former princess.
… But that also meant there would be more enemies. More people she had to kill. She was ready. Ready to kill and ready to die in the name of love.
And as she planted her boot upon the peak of that sand dune, she saw the whole world become bare before her. A fair distance away was the crashed wreck of a golden ship, releasing plumes of black smoke as it burnt away. From this distance, it was difficult to make out any finer details, but she was sure the occupants had escaped. Satori was resourceful and stubborn, if nothing else. Dying in a crash was an impossibility.
She then traced a line from the ship through the shifting sands—to a city upon the horizon. Massive towers of glass and steel pushing against the sky, half buried in the sand, bending light around them as they reflected the intense heat of the sun. It gave the sight an unnatural fuzziness, as if the city was threatening to disappear at any moment.
As she traced the decaying visage of those buildings upwards, she saw a thin line reach beyond and into the sky. The line separated into two before converging back on itself. Above the city, etched upon the sky itself, was a pitch black gap in reality, opened and filled with so many eyes. And above still, the object of Toyohime’s desires and her sole driving factor—Koishi Komeiji.
Though the God’s eye was open, as well as the myriad collection of smaller eyes and drooling jaws that had lined every square inch of her squirming appendages, it was hard to tell if she was awake or conscious. Toyohime knew Koishi best, and if she had any guess as to what Koishi had been doing in the time they spent apart, it was receding back into the numbing comfort of her own mind. Even now, Toyohime figured she was still dreaming, avoiding the cruel weight of her responsibility. What manifested outside of her mind must’ve been some sort of twisted runoff.
Down there, hidden in the dunes, Toyohime knew there were those who would take this dream from Koishi. Those who would hurt Koishi. Those people would’ve done just as well to dig their own graves and build their own coffins. Because so long as Toyohime drew breath, she would protect Koishi with everything she could muster—that was her promise and the nature of her impossible, unconditional love.
Koishi was Toyohime’s second chance.
This time, one way or another, there would be no opportunity for a third.
Mima, on the other hand, had woken up quite a bit earlier than Toyohime had.
She had not suffered any fatal wounds or debilitating strikes leading up to the point where the reality around her started to crumble and distort—but she had briefly lost consciousness regardless. She figured that might’ve been a good thing; an action so absurd and so against everything she knew, perpetrated by an impossibly powerful being… even if a mere glimpse didn’t physically tear her mind to ribbons, she had no interest in trying to understand such a nonsensical event.
Mima awoke not in a desert, but in a grand sprawling city of seemingly human construction. Though the sun still hung overhead, the impossible hills and mountains of sand that caged the city in, always seemed to shift and move in the most calculated way… such that the sun was always put out. Caught in the shade, the city looked like it was in a perpetual night, in spite of the blinding yellow of the endless desert just beyond its limits.
Though that was the case, the city was far from dark. Street lamps, blinding neon signs, blinking traffic lights, apartments and houses with windows illuminated by the fluorescent lights within… It gave the impression the city was alive. It seemed exactly as a real bustling city at night, with its breathing and blinking—but there were no people. No matter how far Mima walked, no matter how many buildings she popped in, she would encounter no souls. She would find, in those buildings, immaculate setpieces filled with lived-in charm, hints and implications of life—but not people. Not even Yukari, who she wandered the streets in search of.
She recognized this place. This city—Tokyo. It couldn’t have possibly been, but it was the same Tokyo she grew up in, back before the Moonlight Descent and before the Kaiju. Before her chance meeting with the youkai who used to be her friend. This city, trapped in the middle of the desert, caught in an artificial night that obscured the flow of time—somehow it managed to be the perfect recreation of a long lost city, as if someone had taken a scalpel to the part of Mima’s brain that held onto the precious memories of her past life. It was comforting, being back in familiar territory, but it also carried along a pervasive uneasiness. The nostalgia said it was real, but the rational mind knew better than to buy into an impossible mirage—made all the more uneasy by the deathly silence of its streets.
After wandering around for a dozen minutes or more, Mima eventually came to find Yukari in a 24-hour fast food joint. She was sitting, out of her suit and miraculously healed, on a stool that faced the street outside, with her head down and a small pool of drool collecting at the point where the corner of her mouth met the countertop. Renko always said Maribel could fall asleep anywhere.
Mima floated back and forth around the gently snoring form of Yukari for a bit, considering her options. She changed back into her Renko form for a second, and after adjusting her hat a little, she reached over to tap Yukari on the shoulder… but then shied away. Glancing at Yukari, then back to her bag, she rummaged through its bottomless contents and pulled out a whole host of items: hand mirrors, makeup kits, two liter bottles of listerine, mints and peppermint breath spray and assorted beauty products.
She stole a quick glance back at Yukari to make sure she was asleep before going at it—in one go, she dumped every minty product she could into her mouth before swishing the unholy mixture in her mouth. It was not a moment later that she coughed out all of that liquid ice with a retch and a gag. Sheepishly, she turned her head to see if Yukari had woken up in all the commotion. Luckily, she was still knocked out something fierce. Mima might’ve guessed she was dead, if it weren’t for the occasional snore.
Undeterred, she opened a hand mirror and began to apply her makeup. Carefully. There was a subtle art to it—she only needed enough to hide any unsightly blemishes she might’ve gotten from her rather shut-in lifestyle as a ghost. Anything more, and Maribel was bound to notice Mima was purposefully fixing her appearance around her. None of that. Mima was trying for a more subliminal approach… It’s what worked in the past, after all.
Well, upon further thought, Mima figured “worked” was too strong a word. She did die before she saw any results, after all. But enough of that, Mima thought—now that she regained her memories, she’s finally gotten another shot. This being the apocalypse and all, she figured she should probably make it count.
She clicked close her portable hand mirror and, along with the rest of her stuff, threw it back into her field bag. She stole one last glance at Yukari, who was still sleeping soundly, before straightening her hat and clearing her throat.
“Maribel…” she said in a quiet, sing-song voice. She placed a hand on Yukari’s shoulder and gave it a gentle shake. “Maribel, wake up.”
No response. Mima pouted as she shook her around again. “Merry? It’s so scary around here—I need someone super strong and amazing by my side. Maybe we could hold hands?”
Nothing but more snoring. Mima’s expression fell. “... Okay, seriously. Wake up.”
“Don’t make me break out the big guns, Merry,” Mima said, digging through her bag and pulling out an airhorn. “I’ll do it. You think I’m bluffing?”
A tense beat passes. Mima stows away the airhorn. “... Ah, I’m just kidding. I wouldn’t do something like that to you. You’re too cute, hehe.”
“I’m not above this, though.” She reaches back into her bag and pulls out a spray bottle filled with water… before giving Yukari’s face a couple of quick spritzes.
That quiet, tranquil expression to Mima seemed almost a timeless representation of the relationship she shared with Maribel quickly contorted into one of disgust. After a moment of being pelted with spray after spray of water droplets, Yukari finally was roused from her sleep, a squinty, grouchy mess.
“Who..? Urgh…” She mumbled with a groan. When Yukari saw Renko, immaculately constructed before her with enough accuracy to convince her she came straight from her memories, she froze. Her voice was barely above a whisper. “... Renko?”
“Hehe… Yep, it’s me! Your best friend. Best girl-friend, even. That is, a girl who is also a friend. Not a girlfriend, you know? Aha… Unless? Kidding, kidding.” Mima flashed an easy smile. “Glad you’re awake. Hey, before you say anything else—how do I look? I look cute, right? I know we’re in the middle of saving the world and everything, but I’ve actually been spending a lot of time taking care of my appearance.”
As Mima continued to ramble on and Yukari continued to wake up, her expression made a slow and gradual pivot. Where at first Yukari couldn’t hide her bemusement from her face—as well as that strange pained expression someone would have, seeing a loved one they have long since finished mourning appear upon their doorstep—she eventually came to settle on an empty stare and a neutral, apathetic expression. It hurt Mima a little, seeing such a radical turn in her demeanor.
“Oh,” Yukari muttered. “It’s just you.”
Mima didn’t think she intended it, but there was a layer of latent annoyance in her words. Or maybe it was disappointment? A thousand years or more apart did a lot to shift their relationship. That much was clear—and it hurt.
Yukari took a moment to look Mima up and down. With a scoff and a roll of her eyes, she delivered an unceremonious answer. “You look fine.”
Mima sighed in response. “Hey, I’ll take it.”
“More importantly…” As Yukari continued, she craned her neck around to absorb every detail of her surroundings: everything from the light fixtures above to the tables that were so meticulously set and prepared. “... Where are we?”
Her eyes naturally gravitated toward the front counter and the kitchen section that was just behind—meticulously wrapped burgers and fresh fries, set underneath heat lamps… it was as if they were all made recently. But that wasn’t even the strangest detail Yukari’s eyes were able to pick out. Upon one of the tables was a tray, filled with half eaten food—as if the patrons ceased to exist in the middle of their meal. This was beyond a mere liminal space, where it gave the impression of once being a place where people gathered—it was closer in relation to the scene of an ongoing disaster, where people had left in a hurry.
In that way, it didn’t carry much of the surreal quality of a place no longer meant for humans—it more so felt like a place with a cursed history, its sinister and mysterious narrative etched into its skin and flesh through the vestiges of human presence. Mima could tell, being a ghost herself, there was more to this place than the physical construction. As to what ‘more’ was, she could not place.
She could tell Yukari was thinking something similar by the way she walked around and took in the feeling of the place. Her posture was rigid and cautious, but not necessarily ready and waiting for danger. There was a quiet dread to the things that weren’t, but should’ve been.
“I’m trying to figure that out myself,” Mima replied, following Yukari around with her arms folded behind her back. “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but… I think we’re back in Tokyo.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy.” Yukari replied. She walked over to the table with the food and traced a finger across its top. No dust clung to the surface of her finger, as if the tabletop had recently been cleaned. She brought the back of her palm close to the food. It was still radiating just a little bit of heat, as if it had been freshly served. “That’s the part that scares me.”
“... Assuming this is all very much real, this must be Koishi’s doing,” Yukari declared, taking a moment to look down at herself. As she flexed her fingers, her eyes narrowed. Mima figured she might’ve just realized she had been healed and mysteriously back to her usual outfit. She still looked younger and weaker than she once was, but there was an undeniable, albeit subtle increase in the vitality she seemed to convey. As Yukari’s eyes wandered to the empty city street outside, Mima couldn’t help but notice that expression—that idle, faraway gaze that looked like Yukari had trapped herself in a vivid daydream. She couldn’t help but realize how much Maribel had changed—and yet stayed the same.
“Whatcha thinking, Merry?” Mima tried, shuffling up to Yukari’s side.
“Yukari.”
“Oh. Right. Ha, that’s my bad. My bad…”
“I’m thinking: why Tokyo specifically?” With a wave of her hand, Yukari opened a gap next to her. Through that little tear in reality was a bird’s eye view of the whole city, as well as the infinite desert that surrounded it. “... There must be some significance to this location, but I couldn’t possibly imagine what it could be. Not right now, knowing what we know.”
“Hey, I grew up in Tokyo, you know? Maybe it has something to do with that? And… y’know, we were teaching in Tokyo before…” Mima gestured vaguely around herself. “... Everything, I guess. Maybe Koishi’s reacting to our memories.”
“Could be. Could just as easily be something related to Koishi. Could be nothing at all.” The view through the gap eventually fizzled out, leaving nothing but the inky blackness of the pocket dimension Yukari held dominion over. She let out a sigh before stitching the gap closed with a wave of her hand. “I’d suggest we keep on moving. Collect as much information as we can about this place. But only what we need—the plan is still largely the same. There’s no telling when she will appear again. Best be as quick about it as we can.”
“Oh. Uh… Alright. That’s cool.”
“... What?”
“Hm?”
“What’s wrong? You disagree?”
“Oh no, ah…” A sheepish grin crawled across Mima’s face. “I was just thinking about how much you’ve changed, is all. It’s just… you know, a huge city missing all of its people is pretty mysterious, huh? Don’t you want to do more exploring? Poke around a bit and take in the sights? Like we used to—just one last time?”
There was an unsettling period of silence where Yukari stared straight through Mima with that flat look. She averted her eyes for a passing moment. When Yukari returned her gaze to Mima, it was steely and cold. “No. Neither of us are kids anymore. We have duties and responsibilities that we can not abandon. Not for anything.”
Yukari brushed past Mima. The gesture wasn’t very rough at all, but Mima felt it come at her hard. As Yukari opened the door, she looked back at Mima and gestured to her to follow.
“Let’s go.”
Orin did not want much from life.
There was Satori, her master, who she cared about deeply. There was Okuu, her best friend, who she loved. There was Koishi, the younger sister of her master, who she felt obligated to take care of. And of course, there was her job of transporting corpses, which she could do endlessly and without tiring. Those things more or less encompassed everything she cared about—Orin was a simple person.
So as she crawled out the emergency hatch located at the top of the ship her master had so recklessly buried into a sand dune, she couldn’t help but feel so hopelessly out of her depth. With a groan, she hoisted herself over the lip of the hatch before losing her balance and tumbling over.
As she tumbled downward, bumping her head against every little edge the ship had on her way down, the visor to her suit cracked and then shattered. But as she flopped down into the warm sand, her arms and legs spread in a state of absolute fatigue, she couldn’t really bring herself to care about the warning tones in her helmet—or the fact she was able to breathe the air here, in what used to be the void. Frankly, all she could think about was how much she wanted to go home.
“Orin! Are you okay?” A familiar voice called from somewhere outside her field of vision. It was followed by the hasty clattering of boots on metal as they no doubt clambered down the ship in a hurry.
All Orin could offer in response was a weak grunt and the extension of a thumbs up.
“Are… are you insane?” Another voice called soon after, all breathless and hoarse. It cracked with exertion, as if it had already been worn out by so much screaming. “Satori, what form of devil possessed you to do that? We could’ve all died!”
Satori, of course, didn’t respond. Not before she entered Orin’s field of view, her own helmet long since thrown away. Her face was etched with a rare look of concern, and she breathed a deep sigh of relief when she saw Orin manage a weak smile. Wordlessly, Satori jostled off the smashed helmet from Orin’s suit and brushed away any remaining debris… before pulling her into a tight embrace.
Orin, dazed and shocked from the crash, could manage little else than to rest her head upon her master’s shoulders as she was pulled in. But through whatever stores of energy she had left, she managed to raise her arms and wrap them around in loose reciprocation.
“I’m okay,” she whispered. “I’m okay.”
Satori pulled back from the hug, but stayed kneeling by Orin’s side. Cautiously, she looked to the horizon, as if she had caught a vanishing glimpse of something stalking them from behind the shifting sands. She extended an elbow for Orin to grab on to. “Let’s go. Can you stand?”
“I… I think so,” Orin mumbled, hooking one of her arms around Satori’s elbow and placing a hand on her shoulder for support. Her master lifted, and in response Orin tried her best to stumble onto her feet, with mixed results. As she straightened herself out with the help of Satori, she heard her bones shift and crackle in strange ways—followed by an absolute lightning strike of localized pain in the leg and the fuzzy static that came to replace it.
After a sharp intake of breath and a pained wince, Orin settled into a decidedly unconvincing posture—she plastered a smile on her face and shifted all of her weight onto the other leg in a poor imitation of nonchalance, but Satori’s face only got graver. It broke Orin’s heart. For a moment, Orin tried to separate herself from her master so she could stand on her own—but Satori only squeezed her in closer, as if she would’ve lost Orin the second she let go.
That didn’t surprise Orin much. She knew better than anyone that the events one year ago were still fresh in her master’s mind. Even now, it haunted her every action, and now the consequences were starting to catch up with everyone involved. But to Orin, that didn’t matter. It never did—not so long as Satori was her master, and Orin was her pet. Satori could march to the deepest pit of Hell, pick a fight with a God, oppose reality itself… and Orin would march along right beside her, no matter what.
Patchouli, on the other hand, did not share the same sentiment. She marched up to the two, at least temporarily uncaring of the fantastical environment they found themselves in, and went straight to airing out her grievances.
“Recklessly engaging with Toyohime like that, against all better logic… one day, and this day might very well come sooner than you think, your obsession with that cursed woman will hurt someone you care about,” Patchouli snapped. As she looked to Orin, whose body was riddled with evidence of blunt trauma, her expression softened. “... It already has.”
“As if we had any other choice. It was our best shot to kill her, once and for all,” Satori replied, stone-faced and cold. “... Besides, let Orin speak for herself. As if you know what she does and doesn’t wish for.”
“... Orin wasn’t the only person who got hurt. Or killed.”
“It just so happens that Eirin conveniently falls outside my definition of ‘people I care about.’ I fail to see the issue.” Satori snorted with disgust, as if offended by the mere implication. Orin wanted to speak up and cut between the fighting, but couldn’t find the strength to oppose her own master. “That aside, who says I was the one who got her killed? She got herself killed, following her own incomprehensible mess of half-baked ideas and strategies. What are you coming at me for?”
“How could you be so cold toward someone like her? Especially since we were all fighting out there together, as comrades? Have you no shame?”
“I’ve no love for her. Not after what she did to my sister.” Satori stared straight into Patchouli’s eyes. Sometimes her master was like this—staring straight ahead through a person, as if judging the content of their soul itself. Sometimes, this was literally the case, given that she made liberal use of her opened third eye. “We might be fighting beside each other, but we’re fighting for completely different things. Yukari, Eirin, Kaguya, even you and I—we’re all fighting for something different. Those are just the facts. Just as it was a fact that Koakuma had darkness in her heart. It’s that kind of fact.”
“How cynical. Aren’t we friends?”
Satori fixed Patchouli with a steady glare as she thought through her answer. Even with an open eye, Orin found her master’s thought process difficult to parse.
“... No. We aren’t,” Satori settled. “It’s not a secret—I’m fighting to get my sister back. I’m fighting to kill the person who turned her into a monster. I’m fighting to protect my family. You are doing none of those things—you’re fighting for a more abstract reason: protecting the world, or preventing human suffering, or whatever other justification you assign to your actions. It’s admirable, but recognize that It’s only by convenience that we’re here, helping each other out.”
“... Is that right?” Patchouli muttered under her breath. “Then if it came between Yukari, or Eirin, or me, or anyone else… and your family. Who would you choose?”
Silence.
“It’s best to be honest with ourselves. It saves us the heartache.”
“I see.”
In the silence that came after, the atmosphere seemed to become heavier. Orin spent each passing beat being suffocated by the pressure. Her eyes darted from Patchouli to her master, and then back again.
“Er…” Orin started. “Let’s ah… could we just figure out what we’re going to do next, maybe? Without fighting—that would be nice.”
“Good plan, Orin,” Satori said. Though strangely enough, she wouldn’t take her eyes off of Patchouli. “I’m not quite sure what we would do without you.”
Patchouli looked away. Orin couldn’t help but feel vaguely responsible—though the second the thought even popped into mind, Satori squeezed a little tighter, as if in reassurance.
“... There’s no use in arguing,” Patchouli said with a heavy sigh. “Or rather, it’s a subject for later, when we aren’t all in danger. For now, I agree—we should figure out our next steps.”
The guns had long since run quiet.
Those satellites—their powerful bodies forged by the greatest minds, cast in the strongest metals, and mounted with the fiercest weapons humanity could muster—how could they have possibly matched the horror of God’s wrath? They could never, and for their hubris, their bodies and their souls were scattered and broken as a million glittering lights upon the ocean.
Those were the kinds of things Kaguya Houraisan thought about as she sat beside a flickering fire, her only source of light deep in the darkness of a desert night, not a few meters from the turned and battered wreckage of the CNS Beyond the Sun. In the void, It was battered by unseen force, turned three times—and upon the fourth, struck down and consumed by the void, as was the divine will of God. To its crew, it might have seemed like nothing less than a castigation of divine nature—but Kaguya knew it was nothing more than the temper tantrum of a child. As infant children must necessarily cry, Koishi must necessarily kill—it was her unconscious will.
Woe upon humanity, as its greatest accomplishment was brought low and made worthless before a child. Her own child. What a dubious honor it was—being the mother of such a terrifying, omnipresent killer.
Kaguya was on the ship when it was attacked by Toyohime. She was there to see Eirin march on to meet her. And she was there to see her die. It didn’t bother Kaguya too much—after all, she had watched Eirin die countless times. She will likely watch her die countless more, before all is said and done. But it was there, seized by the temporary shock, that Kaguya lost consciousness. When she woke up, she was deep within the fresh wreckage of humanity’s greatest weapon—alone. On what happened to her crew, and why Kaguya was spared, she could only make guesses.
With no direction and no plan, Kaguya spent what felt like hours wandering the claustrophobic halls of that great metal cage of a ship. But she was alone. Alone in such a way that not even the impression of humanity remained. Even the spot where she saw three men become atomized by Toyohime’s attack, which had burnt dark impressions of their silhouettes into the steel, was mysteriously void of any sign they were killed at all. The damage remained, but the people were gone—erased from existence in a way only God could manage.
When she eventually emerged from the dark recesses of the ship into a darker night, with nothing but the stars above and the inexplicable ground below, she could do nothing but start a simple fire. The night was cold, and she had a feeling it would be long. Warmth would be needed.
This, alone and huddled by a dying fire, must have been the end. Kaguya shifted closer to the flame, and held her knees closer to her chest. She didn’t know what to do. When her own daughter had sought her out, she didn’t know what to say. All she could do was recognize—that in pursuit of an easy life, she had made things so much worse. She wondered if it was too late to make things right between herself and Koishi. If Kaguya had looked up to her daughter now, and said sorry, would she hear? Would she care?
She wasn’t sure. And she wasn’t sure if she wanted to find out.
As she stared at the stars above, Kaguya heard the shuffling of boots displacing the sand. The sounds came in an irregular, halting motion. When it came to a stop, Kaguya lowered her gaze to the figure who stood at the edge of her fire’s light.
A moon rabbit in a pilot suit, all ripped up, tattered, and blackened by combat. In the gaps of her suit, her skin had melted away from severe burns—and froze in place, creating large patches of gangrenous tissue that covered her body. As Kaguya’s eyes drifted downward, she noticed a patch of body that had a view to the other side. Somehow, by some miracle of medicine, the wound remained stable and closed.
Her face was concealed by her helmet, tinted and patterned by a spider web of cracks, but by the way she stood, so still and lopsided, Kaguya had the impression of an empty gaze just behind the facade.
The moon rabbit carried in her left hand a revolver, its chambers empty and on display as the mechanism that connected the grip to the top half of the hung loose. In her other hand, was an ax, splintered in half at the handle from excessive use and its blade caked in a thick layer of blood.
Without a word, the moon rabbit collapsed into a heap by the fire.
Kaguya rushed to the moon rabbit’s side and, upon removing her helmet, froze.
Atonement—she wondered if it was even possible.
Previous Chapter:
Interim Chapter 11

so I used to feed my cat half a can of wet food at night and allow him to graze on his dry food all day which I would fill the bowl pretty high and he'd eat all of it by the next day, but now he's getting pretty big and I'm starting to try and change his diet before it gets unmanageable
so does anyone have suggestions of what my cat should eat ? I give him about half of what I used to give him of dry food but no wet food aside from the accasional tube treat
he also has a sensitive tummy and throws up easy
should I continue feeding him his dry food or should I feed him only wet food twice a day?

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My online friends and I were talking about toxic workplaces and how working with family members is always a recipe for disaster. I decided to share my toxic workplace story because my parents are small business owners and I worked for them for a total of almost two years on and off. I think that my coworkers didn’t like my dad, the owner, and took it out on me.
I know how much my coworkers made because I was allowed to do payroll after I got my AA degree, and they make less than others in their industry. My parents claim that they hire people with criminal records and drug addiction/mental health issues altruistically because they have a special needs child (I have schizophrenia) but I wonder if it was because they would accept lower salaries.
I have been poor (no homelessness or anything that extreme but I went to bed hungry and didn’t have healthcare) and my dad was kind of insensitive about it (and financially abusive to me) and a lot of my coworkers were financially struggling so if he was like that with them I understand the resentment. Still not my fault though.
I vented about my former coworkers saying that they constantly talked about high school parties even though they were like 30. I mentioned that I hadn’t tried alcohol yet because I was not old enough (18 at the time) and they were rolling their eyes, making teasing and belittling comments, etc. They also acted the same way because I had my first boyfriend at 21. I was upset because they were acting like I was some naive kid who didn’t know what sex and drugs were when I knew and made an informed decision. I described it as ableist because the reason I was abstinent from sex and alcohol until I was 21 was because I knew from shows like Dr Phil etc that mental health issues and a difficult family situation are correlated with addiction as well as risk behaviors and outcomes like teen pregnancy, STDs and getting groomed by creepy old perverts who prey on the emotionally vulnerable. I said that it was like making fun of a diabetic for avoiding sugary food.
Other people were saying that I shouldn’t use the word ableist because they didn’t know what was going on with me and people who have mental health issues can’t be ableist.

Not looking for someone who will just ghost me in a week. Ill put effort in if you do as well.
Im a laid back and chill kinda person. Im smoke friendly and i have cats so thats a plus. Im up all hours of the day and at night.
I enjoy music, art, science, space, anime, games, nature, etc. Hmu if any of that interests you!

I'm Mexican but grew up here in MN. 30 years old, 5'11" and 210 lbs. So a little chubby but I have been more active lately and have actually lost weight, about 40 lbs, over the winter.
Lately I've been trying to stay away from TV and reading more but I do enjoy a good movie or TV show. Mysteries/Fantasy are probably my favorite genres right alongside documentaries and other non fiction material. The Wire is my favorite show to give you some idea of the things I vibe with.
I love music and I like to write it as well. I play guitar along with some other instruments. I'm always down for live music and Jazz is my favorite kind of music. I enjoy photography whenever possible. Generally invovling going for a hike and snapping nature pics.
I enjoy cooking and trying new recipes. I'm a sucker for a nice piece of cookware and cutlery. Bread baking is something I've been into for a while as well. When not cooking I love trying new places and experiencing new cuisines. Definitely not a same meal every day kind of guy.
I'm 420 friendly and imbibe frequently. I also enjoy a good drink, preferably straight whiskey, but I'll try anything once.
Not sure I even believe in love. Not sure I even think life has any meaning at this point. What I am sure about is one of the few things that actually has some meaning is the connection we make with others. A deep, intimate and meaningful bond is something I haven't made yet but still holding a smidge of hope it can happen.
Thanks for reading!

Any recommendations of animal shelters near La Jolla/UTC to drop off cat food and toys?

Hey Reddit community! Most of us know about the carnivore diet and its usual potential benefits. One of the lesser-known but interesting aspects I've discovered is how this diet can positively impact hair health. Let's dive into the details and explore this fascinating topic.
The carnivore diet is an eating plan that focuses primarily on consuming animal-based products such as meat, fish, and eggs, while excluding most, if not all, plant-based foods. It is a somewhat controversial approach to nutrition, but many people swear by its benefits. The science behind the diet's potential impact on hair health lies in the nutrient content of animal-based foods. Here are some key nutrients that can contribute to improved hair health:
High-Quality Protein: Hair is made up primarily of a protein called keratin. When we consume protein, our body breaks it down into amino acids, which are then used to build new proteins. A diet rich in high-quality protein can help provide the necessary building blocks for healthy hair. Animal-based foods, like those found in the carnivore diet, are complete protein sources, containing all the essential amino acids our bodies need.
Biotin: Biotin is a B-vitamin that plays a vital role in maintaining healthy hair, skin, and nails. It helps our bodies convert certain nutrients into energy and supports the production of keratin. Animal-based foods, such as liver, egg yolks, and salmon, are excellent sources of biotin. The carnivore diet, being rich in these foods, can help ensure you get enough biotin to support hair health.
Collagen: Collagen is a structural protein that makes up a significant portion of our skin, hair, and nails. It provides strength and elasticity, preventing hair from becoming brittle and prone to breakage. Bone broth, a staple in the carnivore diet, is a rich source of collagen. Additionally, consuming adequate amounts of vitamin C, found in organ meats like liver, can help support the body's natural production of collagen.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids: These essential fatty acids have anti-inflammatory properties and are crucial for maintaining overall health, including hair health. Omega-3s help nourish hair follicles, supporting hair growth and preventing hair loss. Fatty fish like salmon, mackerel, and sardines are excellent sources of omega-3 fatty acids, making them a perfect addition to the carnivore diet.
Zinc and Iron: Both zinc and iron are essential minerals that play a role in hair health. Zinc is involved in hair tissue growth and repair, while iron helps red blood cells deliver oxygen to hair follicles, promoting growth. Red meat, a staple in the carnivore diet, is an excellent source of both zinc and iron.
For those interested in learning more about the carnivore diet's potential impact on hair health, I have a YouTube video that goes into even greater detail. If you're curious, you can check it out here: https://youtu.be/7y_6Z3yzyP8
Has anyone else seen huge improvements in hair health?

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TL:DR - I need to talk to someone. I really don't want to kill myself, but I'm scared. Most of this post is skippable brain vomit. Basically, I'm having suicidal thoughts and losing control of everything in my life because everything feels meaningless. Sorry for the mess here.
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Hey guys, hope you're all having a great day so far. I'm writing this because I am really confused and don't know what else to do, and you have helped me out before. I feel like my entire worldview is wrong and I'm watching a movie called consciousness. I've posted things like this before on this account, and I've received very helpful responses, so I wanna try it again now, when I feel I am at the lowest I've ever been mentally.
Before all else, I want to acknowledge that there are people whose lives are far worse than mine and that I am blessed beyond comprehension. I am eternally grateful for my life. I'm not rich or famous or powerful. I have a wonderful family, a home, and a prospective future lying ahead, not to mention countless things like my computer, our TV, my car, delicious food, a bike, a pool, and all the freedom I enjoy being a middle class American citizen. I am not suffering tangible difficulty or hardship. I'm not writing this to beg for sympathy or complain about my life. Rather, I'm seeking a different perspective on some issues I have been facing for a very long time that I are all increasingly causing me to want to end my life. If I come across as an attention seeker, I apologize and would love to know how I can correct myself.
It started in January when I had to leave my physical school and move to online school again for the remainder of my 12th grade year. I'm an extremely anxiety-prone person and a grand overthinker, and being alone makes these things flare up, as I learned painfully during Covid when I had similar issues. All of the problems I've ever faced I have created for myself, and I feel safe in saying that this is not an exaggeration.
Basically, I started overanalyzing the world around me, thinking of things so specific it started to scare me, like analyzing the cloud patterns and sunset and biological mechanisms driving my own brain and describing them scientifically in my own head UNWILLINGLY. I started hoarding all the receipts and little pieces of trash I could, like tags from clothes and such, because I feel sad at the thought of throwing them away. I couldn't bring myself to clean my room because I didn't know if there was even a right way to do so, or whether I should throw anything away. I started thinking a lot about the end of time, and the end of my life, and the nature of my own consciousness, and how meaningless everything is because one day it will all be gone.
The transient nature of everything became my only thought, and I can't help but obsess over it. I couldn't enjoy an evening at the park with my sister because my mind was full of unwarranted thoughts of how she, I, the park, all who built, and all who will ever visit it it will one day pass into oblivion. This has led me to start having severe panic attacks and sobbing fits, especially at night and in the shower, when I am totally secluded. I can't enjoy video games, music, reading, playing the piano, driving, talking to people, working out (I still work out, but it's just a routine at this point), coding, eating, watching science and engineering videos, or anything anymore. It all feels gray and dull to me. I am constantly overwhelmed by a feeling of impending doom.
All I can do is watch youtube and distract myself with focus-grabbing stimuli, like movies, eating, and porn (which I had come close to cutting out of my life before this), but I am losing my grip on my life. I am late on my assignments, have not decided on my college yet even though I have been accepted into a ton of them and earned some scholarships. I can't make any decisions. I fall asleep at 3am and wake up around 11am, though this varies greatly. I keep inventing and believing a ton of different bone-chilling scenarios, like being a brain in a vat or being in a simulation or being the incarnation of God himself, and it is terrifying me and I can't take it because it's all stuck in my head on repeat. Even worse, a lot of the time I am propelled into a euphoric high by some random motivation. I can't really describe it. Sometimes I get extremely motivated randomly by looking at something random like a leaf or an ant or a bluetooth speaker and my entire worldview and mindset shifts. Everything becomes oversaturated. I feel alive. Then I crash again and it all turns gray again. It feels weird. All of my goals don't motivate me anymore though, because they are overshadowed by my fear of the end and meaninglessness.
This was just some of the stuff I've been experiencing. I don't really know if I've described it well enough. I have gone to a counselor to try and talk to him about this stuff, but he hasn't really helped all that much, although I appreciate the experience and his friendliness. He was a very nice man. Every day is getting scarier because my mind seems to be digging an ever-widening hole that I just can't escape. It's all chaos. My only respite comes from unexpected places, like going for a drive listening to jazz, talking to my mom while her favorite Christian radio station is on, or working on a random project (like my sister's 4th grade science fair project). It's just that nothing seems to make sense anymore. It's all chaotic and unordered. Like there's no structure anymore. It's all just stuff, jumbled together, and whatever happens happens. My most terrifying moments are when I feel like I'm losing control of myself and waking up from the simulation and everything will be gone immediately and it's being unplugged. I'm alone in this and I feel like I've been stuck in the same place for years. Sometimes I feel like my memories are fabricated and not real. These types of panic attacks have been happening since I was like 10 or 11. I'm 18 now. I'm a boy.
I feel an immense mental, almost physical pressure in my head, and at night I burst into tears and all of my emotions stream through my head and I just pray to God asking for it to go away and most of the time it does. Sometimes I have an outburst and say things I regret to people I love. Sometimes I have a lot of fun with them and we are all happy. I have no ideals anymore because nothing makes any sense and there is no meaning, or so I'm beginning to believe.
The focal point of all of this negativity has been suicide. Every day, I obsess over the idea of not living anymore, of being carefree and just spectating the world rather than living in it only to die anyway, and I keep thinking of different ways I can kill myself. These thoughts are uninvited the majority of the time, and I am forced to endure them. I don't want to die, but I feel like I'm slipping into the hole. I feel like my life is slipping away very quickly and I have nothing left to live for and I've already missed out on it.
I now realize that all of my previous posts have been about this same issue, just in different circumstances. I'm really sorry if I come across in a negative way, as a selfish person or an attention seeker. Maybe I am. I don't know. I just want to be a normal, functional person who can live a meaningful life and die a meaningful death. I want to feel right. I want someone to tell me what to do. I want to stop being alone. I want friends who I can mess around with and not feel anxious while doing so. I want a girlfriend with whom I can share my life and whose trust, respect, and affection I can earn and in turn reciprocate my own. I want a meaningful career that I can leverage to make positive differences in the most crucial and overlooked parts of society, and in creative ways that will leave an impact.
I need someone to talk to. I don't want meds, or maybe I need them. I don't want to be told off, I don't want money or a fancy car or anything. I just want to feel like all of this matters and that someone understands me. I want to be nice to everyone. I don't want animosity. I want to find meaning. But there is something wrong with me. I want to feel like a human again. I just wish I'd grown up with one close friend to share this with. I wanna try going to a therapist, maybe I should.
Thanks for listening to my ramblings. I hope you continue to have a great day, and wish you all the best!

My cat has quickly lost a lot of weight. He had a dental exam last July and has since gone down hill. He used to be the strongest cat and is now wasting away. I have taken him to four different vets in the Dallas area and nobody has any answers and the best they can come up with is irritable bowel syndrome. I boarded him at a vet so they could observe and they had nothing more to add. He has had antibiotics, steroids, x rays, sonograms, blood work and nothing is showing anything too abnorma other than white blood cell count and he is now showing vitamin deficiencies because of his weight loss. He sometimes vomits though not regularly. He makes a grinding sound if he tries to eat (even with wet food). At the beginning of this he had a slight fever which has always stumped the vets. At this point we are considering putting him down as we do not want him to continue suffering. I can't help but think this has had to do with his mouth all along but the vets tell me no. I know it's a stretch to try posting but any thoughts? He will eat lickable treats and tilts his head to the side to chew any food, wet or dry. He is only 7 years old and we adopted him as a kitten.

I feel like nobody takes me seriously when I talk about this. I've made 2 posts on a different subreddit asking for advice, and 1 other post here venting about it and people have only had a bad reaction.
Pretty much, I've been struggling with urges to harm my cat for 6 months now, and acting on them for a portion of that time. At face value, yes, I am a cat abuser. I'm a horrible person who deserves to be thrown in jail for the rest of my life, and get the living daylights beaten out of me everyday. I should have all of my remaining human rights stripped away, for I am not deserving of them, nor am I worthy of being considered a human. I get it, I get it, I'm the scum of the earth. But really, there is so much more nuance to the situation that it isn't fair to make these distinctions without compassion and understanding. Yes, cat abusers have feelings too, shocker.
As for my past, I haven't had much of a childhood, or at least a very good one. Being forced to leave my home land in the Caribbean because of a natural disaster that destroyed the entire island, separating me from half of my family for over 9 months, wasn't a very good start at 6 years old. Witnessing my brother's abuse which included him being beaten relentlessly and punched to the point he was hospitalized wasn't so great. Same with the guilt of watching my brother's hand be smashed with a hammer, breaking the bones in it, after he begged me to lie for him so he wouldn't get in trouble, and my young self being too conflicted to know what I should do. Same with being beaten, myself, for making the mistake of stealing my mother's credit card to experiment with other forms of money. I wasn't trying to do anything bad, of course, I simply had only used cash to buy things and wanted to learn what that little plastic card could do, but my parents didn't know that, they didn't care to ask me. This same type of thing happened on and on, witnessing threats of abuse, witnessing abuse, being threatened with abuse, being abused, over and over. At some point, when I was 10 years old, my father's untreated bipolar disorder sparked up and he had a manic episode. He was convinced that my mother was doing drugs in their closet and cheating on him, and my parents would fight about this everyday. My mom signed the divorce papers but my dad refused to, and they stayed separated for a while.
This was actually the happiest period of my life, when I would stay over at my dad's apartment on the weekends. I remember when he first took me over there, and immediately asked me how the place smelled. I later learned that this was because my mom went over to the place before my dad picked me up, and commented on the smell, which my dad was eager to fix. I fondly remember sleeping on a queen size bed for the first time, with big fluffy sheets and the most comfortable pillows I've ever layed my head on, copper pillows, I believe. I'd have the fan blowing in my face, and be so incredibly relaxed. My dad would take me to buy all the snacks I wanted with the money he earned from his music studio, and I'd stay up all night, using his MacBook to play Roblox with my online friends, having the best nights of my life. After a while, my dad's manic episode had subsided, and my parents moved back in together, happily cuddling on the couch as we watched my favorite children's television show. All was well, and there was absolutely no abuse in this period. It wasn't as good as being alone with my dad, of course, but it was still way better than my life before.
Sadly, though, good things can't last forever, and my dad soon passed away due to complications with his Sickle Cell disease. I felt absolutely nothing, I cried at his funeral but I was no longer capable of feeling. I stayed in this numb state, struggling with online school, and just getting by. After a little under a year of this, I was struck by grief. I just broke down, so incredibly sad, mad, disappointed, every negative emotion I could feel towards his death. The sound ringed in my ears of people at his funeral saying "This is all part of God's plan", "Everything happens for a reason", as I clawed my hair out trying to think, "why? what was the reason?", "why would god do this to me?". It was so intense, I couldn't handle the pain of thinking about it everyday and slept as much as I could to make it stop. When even that didn't work, I tried to go to sleep again, but permanently this time. That still didn't work, and I didn't know what to do other than just continuing my suffering. I was trying my best to keep going, to make it until the end of the year, or at least until my birthday, but that didn't help. On my 11th birthday, I was in the stage of trying to stand up for myself, and I really didn't feel like going out for my birthday, so we rescheduled for the next week. That next week made a horrible day for me, in a way I didn't expect. I was feeling okay enough to go, and started to get ready. My mom wasn't very happy with me though, as she saw the outfit I had prepared. "Go change that hoodie", she said, "It has stains on it". I didn't know what else I should wear and asked why I couldn't just keep the hoodie on. "You look like a homeless person", she began screaming, "You're embarrassing me! People are going to think I'm a bad mom!". At this point I began crying, in pain at the fact that she would think of me as an embarrassment. It shouldn't have surprised me, really, when in the past she had threatened to ship me off to Mexico for not having good enough grades, and threatened to put me in foster care because she disliked the green polo shirt I wanted to wear. It still hurt, though, it always hurts, and I can never get used to the pain. Through the sobs, my heart and mind were racing to find a solution. Find a new shirt, keep defending my current attire, or just give up. I tried the first two options but nothing seemed to work, I couldn't make her happy, so I gave up. She stormed away, frustrated at my response, and I handed her something I soon discovered to be the final straw. "I don't want to go anymore", I said, deciding to be honest with her and myself, and stand my ground as a brand new tween. But it was a mistake, because it only unleashed a slur of yelling and screaming and shouting, as she stormed off to her bedroom. She'd done this quite often before, but this time, she reunited me with an old enemy, the belt. I was still being hit after my dad died, but usually that'd be a slap or punch to the mouth. Not this time, however. She furiously hit me with the belt, over and over and over, as I cried "I just wanted to be comfortable". All of our arguments over clothing have surrounded this, the fact that I want to be comfortable in what I wear and in my own body, but seemingly, my mom wasn't a big fan of that. She then began dragging me across the house, yelling and choking me, saying she wants to cut me and plaster me to the wall, and, of course, put me in foster care, because I'm such a worthless piece of trash that she doesn't deserve the burden of being my parent. My mom brought up this event a few times afterwards, but she seems to have forgotten the details that are now ingrained in my brain, as she sees it as a funny little thing that happened on my birthday, and not as the event that has made tears pour out of me for nights on end, wondering what I did to deserve this treatment.
Anyways, this goes to say that my past has not been good. The history of mental illness in my family has caused a myriad of problems for me, including the cat abuse. You may think "But that's not an excuse!", one thing I've been told before is that "Your mental illness is not your fault, but it is your responsibility". Okay, so I'm still a horrible person for abusing my cat, understood. But throughout my childhood, or lack thereof, I've only been taught that the proper reaction to something you don't like is violence. Cats scratch and bite, which is painful, which I don't like. I feel as though I've been in enough pain at this point, and I won't tolerate some stupid feline adding to that. So, I'd get really angry when my cat would bite me, and I'd try to avoid hitting him, but nothing really worked. I asked and people suggested giving away the cat, which wasn't an option, or staying away from it, which also wasn't an option, as I still wanted to have a good relationship with the cat despite this setback. The urges didn't stop and my cat wouldn't stop biting me, so I gave in. I started hitting him when he bit me to make him stop, but it didn't work. No matter what I did, I couldn't get this cat to stop hurting me. That was, until one day, when I beat him so badly that he released his bladder out of fear on my living room floor. Since then, I would just beat him whenever he upset me to make him stop, and it'd work. Sometimes, anyway. When he just wouldn't cooperate, I'd take him somewhere private, like a bathroom, and beat him until he'd emptied his bladder and/or bowels as a result of my punishments. All I'd wanted was to not be hurt by the little animal that's supposed to look up to me. The abuse is what gave me that. I used it as a coping mechanism, recreating my abuse and taking back control. I'd also get quite a few marks on my hands and arms after our session, that served as a visible form of the pain I endured, making me feel less invisible.
So no, while it isn't an excuse for what I've done, I wish people would look at my situation with more compassion and understanding about the things that lead someone to do this. I would love to be diagnosed with whatever's wrong with me and receive treatment and therapy and medication and whatever I need to stop doing this, but I'd only be able to access that by admitting to what I've done, which just isn't an option for me. As of now, I am 13 years old, and the responsibilities of dealing with my mental illness are too much for a kid like me to handle alone, so I just wish people were more understanding.