Tag: social media
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Balance
I don’t usually preface my prose, but I think this one is important that I explain. This peice comes at the end of a hard year plus of soul searching after acknowledging to myself that I was sexuslly assaulted. After nearly two years plus I buried it deep, but in the fall of 2024 on a cold morning while filling my car at Costco it all came back and hit me like bricks of ice. I barely made it through the day at work, but I did it somehow. All assault victims experience the same things, but men especially white men are given very little acceptance or grace by soceity as a whole, left & right ideologies judge heavy on your worth after, or even your right to claim victimhood in a world that wants you silent. It took most of the year to consider myself a survivor.
I guess its the times, but I have spent a very long time pondering aggreivment after being swallowed by it and spit out. The pull to hate and rage at those of the opposite sex was strong, some days it had consumed me. Too blame ALL women for the actions of a few, is absurd! I don’t want to be bitter or aggrieved, I think this poem captures the toxic cycle of aggreived victimhood. I had come to terms and this poem exposes what it is. Yours, Jake
Why does the bar tip the other way, while trying to equate and balance both sides?
to much weight on one pan
the fulcrum tilts, the beam always holds, the beam always wins
the villians are now the oppressed, the once oppressed villiansTransmutation of suffering into bitter rage
Alchemized survivor becomes the predator
Spittle & spite
Vengance so bright
Inferior to superior
Your Humanity now blight
My dear organizing systems forming entwining, no boundaries of the bottomless hunger
of self-righteous rage
the victims, the survivors
It doesnt matter to It who is in control, It doesnt care about justification, the thing exists.
Hoary worm of eons crushes bones, devours flesh, pukes blood, gnashing sinew, slurps guts, sucks entrails smashed
made into mash
Bulbous rot, engorging the gullet, suffering inside the gaping hole, digested birthing vile gas from the fermented bile of humanities sins
Orborus the obese worm, engorged distented on your suffering; prey-as-to-predator-to-victim-survivor-as-to-predator…as-to-victim…it’s the sweet….
…suffering
sweet…..
…sweet…….sufferingsuffering
©️ Jacob A. Pickard. 2025. -
Social Media, Being A Writer & Bonding
So back in 2015 I stopped using Facebook and Social media all together, i did have a My Space before that. In-between I dabled in Reddit, twitter, and Instagram all of which in my point of view are cesspools. Not that I’m a saint, but I detest those who catfish & scam, trolls, asshole partisians, virtue superiority signaling, maga, aggreivment gender supremacist, trauma grifters, and the general way people treat eachother with disrespect and make instant judgements on your life and character. Also, the stalkers, who go after you, plenty of those ass hats.
I orginally quit social media in 2015 for two reasons, with my friends it felt hallow and fake why not just talk, the second was how MAGA used it with Cambridge Anylitica to get Trump elected, blatant manipulation and FaceBook was cool with it: that was to me grounds to tell FB to fuck off. I haven’t been back since, nor Amazon for that matter. I’ve always made decsions based on my politics and where I spend my money and what platform I allow to advertise to me i take important. One of the reasons I left Substack, because it’s owned by a libertarian tech bro. After the Charlie kirk assination they let MAGA gaslight and make death threats for at least a week. I have no doubt just like Zuckerberg & X, soon as a writer or blogger they will write into the terms that your work, copyright, or IP will no longer be protected.
The thing that disappoints me the most about social media is relationships with other people, or the superficiality of them. I am a person who always is trying to “bond”. I’ve found that the vast majority of people you think you are bonding with are not treating the experience of learning about eachother the same way you would physically, as in face to face. It’s as if the wired has a “buffer” that keeps these bonds that you build from ever becoming reality. I can’t imagine how it is to date with online apps, it must be like going through a menu at a 24 hour greek restaurant at 3am with a bunch of other drunk people.
In December of 2024, I went back in and to blueskye trying to push back against X like many X’ers, then came WordPress for my writing, then I left both for Substack in may of 2025 (also, partly because a WordPress writer was actively gaslighting me). I went to SS just when the notes part (the social media part) of SS came online. Though, I met a lot of cool people on Blueskye & Substack many who had helped me through some of the toughest emotionaly horrible months of my life, there has been only one that I have a meaningfull relationship with that I have from all of it.
The cruelty I faced for coming out regarding my assaults was sometimes overwhelming. The anger and spite directed at me for speaking out just to be heard, the cruelty, the hate, the rage. I finally had enough of it on SS too, like I had on Blueskye. Living with an assault considered taboo, I have no idea what I was thinking trying to find answers on social media sites. I was desperate just to find some grace in a world that views you as a villian at birth, even though you were not the villian, and the experience goes against the narrative.
Now, I plan on staying on WordPress. The last year has been an education for me. Social media is not for some people, I am one of them.
I’m a writer, on the darker side, and a terrible artist, but what I show you and what you read is genuine, it’s from my heart and mind. The majority of the art or images I take myself.
I give you me and I ask nothing from you in return.
©️ Jacob Pickard. 2026.
Ecoheretic 