MENTAL HEALTH

Wait, It’s Not My Responsibility To Fix the Entire Planet?

Learning to breathe again

Joe Guay - Dispatches From the Guay Life!
Human Parts
Published in
7 min readDec 4, 2023

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Photo by Godisable Jacob via Pexels

Yikes, a daily stream of consciousness that confronted me — an average trip to the market.

My goodness, more tents, more homeless at that underpass. I hate this. I should give money. No, I already donated to that cause, and I don’t trust charities anymore after that documentary. Stupid Uncle Ralph says they brought it on themselves — drugs. They’d only use the money to buy alcohol. Fuckin’ Fox News. He used to be so smart, how did they reel him in too? Sure, it can be drugs, but what about city planning? Why so much blight? No one wants to ride public transportation anymore — homeless everywhere. This would never happen in Europe — there, public transportation’s appreciated as an actual human need. Here, looked down on as something only for the poor, so there’s no incentive to fix it. Like education — education isn’t a priority here, there’s always more money for the Pentagon, let’s just keep those teachers as the most-looked-down-upon profession, please. Ugh, I used to encourage people to take the subway — now I’d be afraid to. Look at San Francisco — I’m a liberal, but that city’s too-liberal policies let people shoot up in the street, poop on the corner, it’s a disgrace, what a downfall to a once-great place. No, but it’s the…

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Joe Guay - Dispatches From the Guay Life!
Human Parts

Joe Guay, a recovering people-pleaser, is an essayist, actor/voiceover guy with musings on mental health, LGBTQ, humor and travel & nature as church