I run on hope.

No, literally. Hope keeps me going. Hope keeps me alive. When everything was darkest back in 2015 and I was not capable of picturing a future that had me in it, when I was convinced that I would be doing myself in within the next three months, when it was utterly impossible to believe that there was a future with me in it... I harnessed myself to hope. I couldn't believe that I would survive, but I could believe that maybe tomorrow would be less bad than today. That if I kept myself going in the name of things being better, even if I couldn't see it coming, maybe I could endure until things actually did improve.

That was maybe the biggest piece of the foundation that I built my mental stability on later, because heaven knows there wasn't much else left for a foundation at the time. Arguably, it wasn't a good move. The current state of the world and the people in power and the climate actively damage that foundation. Paying too much attention to the news is more than just mentally unhealthy for me, because it knocks cracks into the foundation that lets the despair through. And with big enough cracks, the suicidal ideation comes back. As in, "things are not going to get better, you should have ended it five years ago, better correct that mistake". I _think_ I could manage to keep myself around even if there were severe damage inflicted there, but I really don't know. The ties that bind get awfully strained when the days get darker.

What that _means_ is that joking about there being no hope, about the world being better off destroyed, about the human race being better off wiped clean from the face of the planet, is actually directly acting against the things that keep me alive. It gets me thinking that I _shouldn't_ be here anymore, that with no hope for the future I should just make my exit. I have to start muting people who do this too often, in order to keep myself functional.

I'm not blaming anybody for this kind of behavior, I'm as familiar as anybody else with dark humor sometimes being the only way that you can laugh at anything at all all. I'm just saying if you're gonna do it, please don't do it at me. We have content warnings for this and they work, but they don't help much if you show up in my notifications. And if you actually really fully believe that we _should_ all be removed from the world? If there is any kindness anywhere within you please don't push that at me because it might actually work.

I am okay right now, I'm not at risk for anything, but this is something that I've been chewing over for a while and I think I need to say it explicitly.