Cafe Zoo

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

I honestly believe that we zoo priders are setting our sights a little bit low if we are only intent on reaching out to furries, which are really a difficult youth culture to understand if you are not a part of it. I've known about furries since the 1990's, and I still don't understand the core of their community. I actually feel a stronger affinity toward the transformation community, which is related, and that's also a substantially more obscure and older group. Regardless, it cannot possibly serve us, in my opinion, to restrict ourselves to a microcosm of people that have seemingly similar interests. It's just putting us on hemmed-in ground, and strategem gets very tiring.

I am many things besides being a zoo. I am also a person that has a strong interest in navel-gazing, for example. This goes back to my teens. I was always that type of person a lot more than I was any type of sexuality. Sure, those old roleplaying servers were good for a hook-up, but I was not always in a mood for a hook-up. I had other things that I was interested in. I had other stuff that I liked to think about.

What is going to win the cause for us is simple intersectionality. You are not just your sexuality. You are many things. You have many parts. This is just one part. That part of you is not anything to be ashamed of.

Wherever else you hang out, either online or "IRL," the fact that you are a zoo should never have to be a taboo subject, even in contexts that are not even slightly related. Wherever you have friends, you have people that know what kind of person that you really are.

The antis are currently focused on evangelizing their hateful beliefs to the furry fandom, but they cannot be everywhere at once. They do not even know most of the places we like to hang out, and where they are not looking, they cannot evangelize their hateful ideology. There are many communities that I fit in with substantially better, to be perfectly honest.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

Just a poem, this week.

English ivy blooms
Jet plane screams to empty sky
Hushed murmuration

Web worms weave white shrouds
Harvest combine roars and grinds
A murder of crows

Paper leaves rustle
Cargo truck waits at bay door
Sparrow's ragged molt

I love the autumn. It is a time of change.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interesting others,

I have been very busy working with some friends on various things, and I have not really had time to write very much.

I really feel better about everything when I see my friends coming together to get something new off the ground. These kinds of experiences just never get old, and I always feel so inadequate during these experiences. Another friend of mine says that he sometimes suffers from "imposter syndrome," and even though I sometimes pretend that I am immune to that syndrome, I am really not immune.

But these people are my friends. That means something to me.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

On behalf of the human race, I am sorry for our limitations. Getting different groups of humans to get along with each other can be substantially more stressful than socializing cats, and the cats are more gracious about it.

This is nothing new, in the big picture. It is actually amazing that humans no longer attempt murder on each other for being third, rather than second, cousins. I can scarcely imagine the melodramatics that the feet-draggers made when we originally had the idea of starting civilizations.

However, a lot has happened within only the past 200 years. Only 170 years ago, we in the United States were still working on disseminating the idea that people with different color skin were members of the same species. Women have only been allowed to vote for 103 years in this country. De jure racial segregation in the United States was only ended in 1954. Stonewall did not occur until 15 years later, but even after Stonewall, the struggle for gay rights would take until 2003 to overturn the last of the sodomy laws. Same-sex marriage has only been legal, throughout the United States, since 2015, almost half a century after Stonewall. Admittedly, these things could only happen with considerable melodrama and substantial patience, yet here we are.

Well, here we go again. Right now, we zoos and our allies are in the process of trying to get at least some of our countrymen to a point where they can discuss the subject of zoophilia, in conversations where zoophiles believe they have a right to an opinion, without behaving like mentally unhinged chimps that have been sniffing glue. As some of you might have noticed, this is a work in progress.

If it's any comfort to you, they actually behaved worse over the other stuff.

Nevertheless, I like humans. Humans can be amazing animals. They can be insatiably inquisitive, and in this way, they can be like those rare animals that never stop being the equivalent of puppies. Their hands are beautiful. One of my favorite things about them is the way that some of them get when they are out after dark, and they look up at the stars, wondering when they will earn their right to go and visit them.

I think that the most wonderful thing about human beings is grandmas: no matter what epic failures our parents are, most of us have a grandma in our lives that makes everything better, or most of us that don't can find a similar figure in our lives. I cannot ever truly give up on a species that has grandmas.

It can be tempting to give up on your fellow human beings by going away to hide, but please, stay. Give them a chance. In spite of everything, humans can be kind of cool. Start with grandmas, and then think about the other cool stuff about this improbably weird species.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

I have had two people remark to me with confusion, regarding my word-usage and my motives.

First, I reject the idea that I should ever avoid the word "activism" in order to "avoid triggering people." The only people that get triggered by the word "activism," as far as I know, are alt-right douche canoes that are terrified of what the word "activism" represents, which is social change. If you actively promote social change, then you are an activist, by definition, and this is true even if all you did was whisper your opinion to your best friend. You don't have to do anything flamboyant in order to fit the definition. I am a person that believes that change is good, and if I can, I hope that I can help it along.

You don't even have to have a limited purview of what kind of social change you should want to promote, even if you are a zoophile. On Twitter, there is a man that calls himself Akela, and he is not fighting for zooey equality, although I believe that he would, conditionally, agree with the idea. He is fighting against animal torturers. As far as I can tell, he believes that everybody, including zoophiles, are responsible for reporting serious crimes against animals and for censuring violence against animals. He can be a little bit abrasive, but I admire the guy. What he is doing is something I consider to be worth doing.

It's because of that guy and his followers that I realized why I don't like the majority of pornography that is directed at zoos. I do not see it as especially zooey. I have trouble believing that somebody that could be aroused by it has ever actually had sexual relations with an animal, or if they have actually done what I see in those videos, about half of them ought to be--let's say "lectured firmly" because maybe I shouldn't say what really comes to mind. It makes us zoos look bad if at least half of the pornography, on our websites, looks like rape, especially from the perspective of an experienced zoophile that understands zoophilia as a legitimate and pure expression of love. A part of what I think happened, to us zoophiles, is that our porn is horrible crap, and we did not think enough of ourselves to recognize that we deserved better. We deserve to represent ourselves better.

However, the fact that we have been allowing that kind of crap, on our servers, is really a symptom of self-loathing. Standing up for morality comes from a place of self-respect. Your morality is not just a matter of right v. wrong, but it is a component of your dignity. It is a part of your self-love. The belief, "I am worth something" is not very far from the belief, "I am a good person," and if you can just make yourself say it, then you can commit yourself to being a good person.

I am going to come back to the word "activism." The people that feel triggered by that word are people that fear social change. They are not afraid of perverts that have sexual relations with animals, just as long as they stay in their place, on the dismal mudsill of society. As long as we remain anonymous, faceless perverts, they don't care about us, either way. They like having us there as the eternal scapegoat for why they hate other groups of people.

There was a time, in the history of the United States, when we were fighting against the anti-miscegenation laws. It surprises some people to be reminded of this, but there was a time, in my nation's history, when it was a crime, in some places, for a white person to marry a non-white person. We zoophiles were used by people that were spreading racist hate. They said, to America, that if you allow the mixing of the races, then you may as well allow people to mate with animals.

When the subject of same-sex marriage came up, then again, we let ourselves be used. "If you are going to allow two men to marry," the bigots said, "then you may as well allow a man to marry his horse!"

In both of those cases, we were used as an explanation for why it was okay to be hateful toward others. We were used as tools.

We should have been standing up for ourselves at the same time when African-Americans were standing up against Jim Crow. We should have said, to the racists, "No, you are NOT going to use us as a cudgel to beat up other people with. You shouldn't be hateful toward us, either." We should have done the brave thing and the right thing, during that time in American history.

When I use the word "activist," I only mean that I believe that social change is a good thing, and I believe that it is good for society and good for me if I can do something to promote social change. If zoos can earn social emancipation, then nobody can ever again use zoophiles as a cudgel to beat up other people with. That's not just a win for zoos, but it's a win for everybody else.

No, I am not some kind of mastermind. I do not have some sort of "master plan." That kind of talk is idiotic for several reasons. For one thing, a real social movement is not just made up of one person, but is made up out of many people. I do not control Akela, for example. We don't even always agree, although I think there is a lot to be admired about Akela. He's not my follower, and I am not his follower. Just because we sometimes agree with each other does not make one of us subordinate to the other. We are independent, freethinking adults.

I also have a close friend, which some of us nicknamed "The Sheriff," that mostly just cares about zoophiles having access to good psychotherapy: he has serious PTSD, and he has suffered from discrimination, in the healthcare system. He had to leave his GP because his GP's extreme prejudice against him had made him feel unsafe. He struck out, at first, while he was trying to get help for his PTSD. He wants to change how zoophiles are treated in the healthcare system. He has helped a mutual friend of ours that was a victim of extreme sexual abuse get the therapy he so desperately needed, and he has helped others to get the excellent standard of care that they deserve. That group of people is not under my control. They are not taking instructions from me. I am not their commander. They are independent, freethinking adults that happen to be zoophiles, and they also happen to give a crap about themselves and others.

Someone that accuses me of being or thinking myself to be some sort of "mastermind" with a "great plan" just does not understand what a large social movement is at all. We are diverse people with many different life histories and many different motives. The specific things we are trying to do are not even identical.

I'm not out there doing the same thing as those two people. Most of what I do amounts to navel-gazing and sociological prognostication, to be honest. Some people think that that is meaningful. Some people think that my sometimes half-formed or barely formed ideas, regarding historical cycles and historical causation, help them to make sense of what is going on around them. At heart, I see my views as being a more long-winded than usual form of common sense.

If society makes a group of people feel unsafe in their own homes and disrupts those people's ability to take care of their everyday needs, then society should not be surprised if those people might have an opinion or two about how society has behaved toward them. To assume that they would have nothing to say at all would reflect a truly grotesque misunderstanding about human nature. I see this as pure common sense. If I carry on about the subject at greater length or attempt to analyze the particulars, then it might be hard to see the grain of common sense that lies at the heart of all of the navel-gazing and prognostication, but that grain of common sense is where it all comes from. Sometimes, the navel-gazing and prognostication that I derive from it is off, or I do not express myself as clearly as I had intended. However, I perceive that basic grain of common sense as uncontrovertible.

Beyond that simple grain of common sense, it's okay if you say that Sigma just likes to hear herself talk. A few other people, out there, also like what I have to say. There are also people that find what I have to say to be perplexing and confusing and poorly worded, and one of them even happens to be my current best friend in the entire world. Nevertheless, I would tell that person that the grain of common sense at the heart of it is sound. If I have a long way to go before I am able to be universally understood, then I would agree with that person. I intend to live for a very long time, though, and that will give me plenty of time to practice.

The zoo pride movement is a diverse one, and each of us in the movement is doing something slightly different. I admire my friend, The Sheriff, and I admire my esteemed tovarish, Akela, whom I would truly like to have a chance to get to know as a friend, someday. There is no "master plan" because we are each our own masters. My navel-gazing is only that, at least taken all alone. I am not alone, though, and because I am not alone, I feel very fortunate.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

I have been hookey this week, but I've been part of some interesting developments in that time. More on this Sunday.

Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

Recently, a furry zoophile named Hypnotist Sappho posted a coming out video that I considered to be beautiful. If you look at the comments in order of the newest-to-oldest, you will actually find a surprising number of people in the comments there that are genuinely curious, and many of them are allies and fellow zoos.

I posted a few comments of my own, but after I had posted one of my longest comments, I realized that that comment said a large number of things that I believe, regarding the zooey and furry communities. In fact, I think that it's the best job that I have done on explaining my feelings.

The most amazing thing about the comments, on this video, is that the anti-zoophile goon squad has tried but failed to drown out real conversation. If anything, this reminds me of the late 1990's and early 2000's, when furry venues were still being attacked by Something Awful's goon squad on a regular basis, which for a while had utterly drowned out real content: in spite of many small furry-themed sites and personal sites getting shut down, many of the furries of the day stayed resilient, and the furry community survived. In time, the attacks became infrequent and sporadic, and eventually, they stopped altogether.

This would be the first zooey coming out video that I have seen drawing a large minority of positive and neutral comments, including a substantial number of opportunities to educate and to share some good humor with some of the commenters. While there has still been a substantial amount of bullying, the bullies now seem to be a small group of dedicated zealots intermixed with the usual unabashed jerks that only come for recreational harassment.

The longer we zoophiles stick around in spite of the harassment, the more obvious it is going to be to the zealots that we zoophiles are not ever going to disappear, no matter what they do and no matter how cruel they are toward us. Their will to be hurtful toward others is ephemeral, and our will to live with a sense of pride and dignity is much stronger and more permanent.

Furthermore, there is no such thing as a state-level statute, in the United States, that overrides our constitutional rights. Because of our constitutional rights, it is all but impossible for any state government to create a statute that could realistically invade upon what we zoophiles might or might not do in the privacy of our own homes, clearly with no intention of affecting anybody else by doing so. Those statutes that have been passed are weak, and the faults in those statutes have already been settled by the Lawrence v. Texas ruling, which was originally based on the right to privacy implied by the Fourth Amendment. It's already been settled: those statutes are not worth even half the recycle value of the paper they are written upon, and they are doomed to be overturned by our justice system. It might take us a few tries to get our challenges to the Supreme Court, but in the most liberal states that have stood up for the Fourth Amendment in the past, we have precedent on our side. Keep faith because we can win as long as our nation is free.

To all so-called "furries" that have been spreading anti-zoo hate, I ask you to stop pretending that I ever intended to associate myself with you at all. The furry fandom that I know and love has always been a bastion of tolerance and friendship, and that is a large part of why I ever identified as a furry, to begin with. If you come here to spread hate, then whatever you call "furry" is not what I have in mind when I use the term. Just because we are using the same word does not mean that we are referring to the same thing. If you would spread hate or any other kind of harmful speech, then I ask that you exclude yourselves from what I am referring to when I use the word "furry." It is a shame that some of you have become so ugly and petty that you have resorted to suicide-baiting, and you really have sunk low if you have gone into that abyss.

To my fellow zoophiles, I realize that not all zoophiles accept furries, but tough titmouse. I cannot change the fact that I am a zoophile. I genuinely believe that I was born with this distinction. This distinction does not have to define my values, though, and I will not let it define my values. The values that were represented by the furry fandom I stumbled upon, in the 1990's, had instant appeal to me. They resonated with everything that I believed and felt. I was a child that had grown up on Watership Down and The Secret of Nimh and an almost amazing number of books that happened to have dragons on the covers. I had found people that were like me: they were sci-fi and fantasy fans that loved animals, and they had a truly amazing passion for creativity that made me feel humble. I cannot choose to be either a zoophile or a non-zoophile, but I do have the power to choose my values. In the wider world, the idea of "furry" has grown to refer to a more expansive subculture and a substantially more diverse collection of value-systems, including value-systems that I disagree with vehemently, but to me, "furry" will always mean what it was to me on that fateful, chilly evening in November, 1997, when both my body and my heart craved warmth.

Perhaps we can attribute these promising beginnings of a shift, in the tone of these comments, to the beauty and good taste with which this coming out video was executed. This ought to be a lesson for my fellow zoophiles: I believe that if we go out of our way to create something tasteful and beautiful, then people notice. People notice if we care enough, in our hearts, to try to make something nice. This should be a precedent for us all. Art matters, people.


Thank you,
Sigma

Woo, late again, but I have been a little bit distracted.

Before it leaves my mind, I want to say that I have had my nose stuck in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, lately, right up to my eyeballs, and I am pretty sure that I have been influenced, at some point, by fanfiction that was indirectly inspired by the Foundation series, which is also true of the Star Trek series. For instance, I did not realize that I knew a large quantity of Trekkie themes until I realized that almost all of my favorite sci-fi themed fiction, from the 1990's, was really set in the same universe or a similar universe, sometimes with different characters and species put in. Now that I am reading Asimov's work, I am recognizing a similar pattern: I already knew the philosophy behind this series, even though I had never actually read it.

The idea behind the Foundation series, by Isaac Asimov, is that we can predict the future based on a statistical treatment of human behavior as if they were a natural force. Instead of predicting the behavior of individuals, the fictional science of psychohistory was focused on predicting the behavior of mobs. In general, it is assumed that one can assume that the progression of historical events, in a certain situation, will play out in similar ways.

For instance, the fall of a civilization tends to happen along a few different paths. An oppressive upper class can use their society's middle-class as lackeys to help oppress and to act as scapegoats for the working-class, and at the same time, they can use the unemployed criminal class as paramilitary thugs for bullying the working-class, thereby keeping the working-class in line. In this way, the working-class can be reduced slowly into serfdom while the former middle-class takes on the role of petty local tyrants. This incentivizes using similar Machiavellian tactics to overthrow the upper-class and replace the old government with a new government, but due to the fact that being in power, in such a system, has incredibly high rewards, there is very little incentive for the new rulers to really change the system, which just leads to more of the same. Ultimately, good government breaks down as the upper-classes become evermore corrupted and hereditary. The petty local tyrants, that previously served only as tools of the people that were really in power, can develop an inflated idea of their own significance, which leads to proto-nationalist sentiments. However, they ultimately become isolationist and xenophobic, leading to restrictions in trade. Restrictions in trade lead to economic inefficiency, and this leads to more chaos throughout society, which further incentivizes xenophobic sentiments. Famines break out, which leads to the outbreak of epidemics. The epidemics lead to even further isolationist sentiments. The system of serfdom, even though it was previously only a tool that was used to instill fear in local peasants by a profoundly corrupted empire, ultimately gets raised to moral infallibility, meaning that, no matter how closely it resembles slavery or worse, nobody dares to call it out for what it really is. Without intervention, such a dark age can become so deeply entrenched that, without intervention, it can take as long for the human race to rise up from it as it had originally taken to come up with the idea of civilization in the first place, which was originally several thousand years in the making, NOT the mere one thousand years that it took to get through the actual European Dark Ages.

However, with external stimulation, such periods of barbarism can be foreshortened, just as long as there is one remaining center of enlightened and innovative thinking left in the universe. In order to promote this kind of thinking, though, you sort of have to remove the active agents from the center of that failed empire, and from there, they have to act as if they were a small fragment of the worthier aspects of the empire, which had originally made that empire possible to begin with. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remove them from the temptation to merely take over the damaged hulk of the old empire and fall back into the same pathetic patterns. In European history, this took the form of the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was not centered in Rome, ironically, but it was centered in the more western parts of Europe. The center of government was surrounded by semi-barbaric Germanic tribal people that had barely had any loyalty at all to the original Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire used a series of political machinations, often bloody wars, to gradually lift Europe back out of its seemingly endless Dark Ages. Ultimately, the Holy Roman Empire was replaced by secular rulers as literacy and reason was gradually restored to the people.

Nevertheless, a part of what guided Europe through those Dark Ages was actually the surviving fragments of the old intellectual classes of original Roman Empire. Their subculture was largely invisible throughout the Dark Ages, and at times, they were secretive. At times, they did not even truly exist outside of some recopied texts that survived thanks to the work of illiterate monks, who often could not even read in the languages that they semi-robotically transmitted. Ultimately, the old science of the Roman Empire, which was represented largely in a single text named De Rerum Natura, by Titus Lucretius, was revived by some Franciscan monks, which were the more liberal and probably overwhelmingly zooey branch of the Catholic monastic orders.

Anyhow, one of the most important aspects of the rebuilding of a civilization is, ironically, crisis. Asimov seems to believe that civilization cannot possibly advance at all unless a series of crises shake-up the existing order and thereby force it into various cultural revolutions. For instance, World War I and World War II could be thought of as such a crisis: as terrible as it was, the sheer horror of that situation forced Europe into reconsidering their pattern of behavior. If they had NOT fought the World Wars I and II, then they would have only continued to try to hold together the incredibly faulty Pax Britannia, which would have eventually become a hereditary and corrupted system. The wars themselves broke the system and thereby forced them to change in ways that those in power would have never really wanted to change without being in fear for their lives if they had NOT embraced change. In the Foundation series, by Isaac Asimov, this would have been called a "Seldon crisis."

Well, we zoophiles have lately been in a state of crisis. Under current conditions, we cannot hold together any type of society, among ourselves, at all UNLESS we embrace change. We would have never started a process of change WITHOUT the crisis that I believed reached its nadir in 2018. We went through a shake-up, and that shake-up has done two important things: firstly, it has driven the sorts of people that tend to have truly selfish motives deep underground, so they are unlikely to have any strong influence on the overall development of our culture. Secondly, the sorts of people, among us, that tend to have any kind of principles and self-respect at all have been forced into a position of seeing how ugly the consequences of carelessness and complacency really are. The self-same fact that we were put into such a perilous situation has actually had an important shaping influence on the very shape of our society and the tone of our culture. In other words, we zoophiles have been through a sort of Seldon crisis of our own, just in miniature.

To exterior appearances, it looks like we zoophiles are as utterly defeated and squashed as we could possibly be, but we have been squashed down so far, so fast, and so ruthlessly that the sheer force of harmonic motion must inherently result in us having a sort of natural "bounce-back." Our leadership, though, will have the benefit of the lessons of history behind them, and having learned the lessons of history, they will probably move forward with greater calculation and also with greater determination to prevent themselves from ever feeling so powerless ever again for as long as they live.

Remember, society needs us zoophiles. We play a natural role in a society's health. We would not exist at all unless we played some important part in the greater organism. We have a responsibility, toward society, to protect our long-term health. As hard as it is to love a society that has hurt us so badly, these are our people, and we are obligated toward them. We must recover our senses, and we must get back to playing whatever mysterious role we must play in the greater scheme of things.

We have been through our crisis. We have learned our lessons. Let's build the Second Zooey Empire.


With affection and good humor,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zoo allies, and interested others,

A handful of people have been some very good friends to me. They have been stabilizing figures in my life.

The wave of anti-zoo hostility, in some subcultures, really hit people like me the hardest. I didn't have a family that I could turn to for support, but I only had my peer-groups, which included the LGBT community and also certain subcultures. When my faith in those peer-groups vanished, the ground disappeared out from under me, and I was in free-fall.

I wish that I could say that those hardships made me a better person, but they really did not. I was an angry person that said angry things. I made a bad impression even on some fellow zoos because of that. Well, of course, I was angry. A person that is not angry, over betrayed trust, cannot be said to be a healthy person, in the long run, but the person that has justification, in feeling angry, is no less of an utter maelstrom at the time.

What actually did make me a better person was spending more time around my most trusted friends and volunteering my time and resources to try to be a part of something special. Those are strong transformative experiences. Being a part of creative labor, especially challenging creative labor, just feels good to do.

Because of that creative labor, someone came to me and only to me, in the past couple of weeks, saying I was the first person he had ever opened up to about being a zoo, and he told me everything in the most amazing detail. It turned out I already knew of at least three other zoos and a reputable sex therapist in his state, and it turned out to be a heartening experience. I don't know if he realizes it, but I find him to be an incredibly positive sort of person to know.

We zoos cannot reliably be pleasant people if we are still reeling from recent betrayals, and utterly savage betrayals often play a tremendous role in shaping our lives. It cannot be healthy to accept those betrayals. Nevertheless, it also cannot be healthy to spend one's entire lifetime feeling jilted.

The feeling of pain proves that we can feel, but pain also must pass.

I have become wiser and more cautious because of my hardships, and that wisdom and caution has rewarded me with some truly spectacular friends and a chance to be a part of something genuinely special. I was a good girl: I learned my lessons. I learned from that pain response, and I went and put myself into a better place.

If anyone has noticed that I have become a less angry person and seemingly a better person, it only shows that I react to the kinds of things that I have going on in my heart. I lack the very capacity to be artificial.

While I might never truly feel grateful for the rough way in which I was taught about how precious a real friend is, I can appreciate that understanding, regardless of how I arrived upon it.

Good friends have made a difference for me, and the more I move beyond the bitterness of past betrayals, the more I find that I can let the benevolence of decent people shine through.


Thank you,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

Again, a little bit of a late posting, but I have a good excuse, this time. By the way, I am moving this back to Sunday because, frankly, it's my one solid day off.

Sometimes, I meet one of those people that remind me of why coming out, at least to ourselves, is important. The reason behind it is almost ineffable unless one knows a few details about human psychology that I am not as clear on, yet, as I would like to be. I am restricted to using clunky metaphor and simile in order to get close to it.

The feeling of being in the closet and also in a state of self-denial is like the feeling of being a compulsive gambler. Most people that have a gambling problem reach a point, eventually, where they know that they have a gambling problem, but it is a psychological trap that gets its jaws closed tightly around a person's mind, even that of a very smart person.

A gambler can get into the mental trap of throwing good money after bad, for one example of the complex and multilayered nature of this trap. They realize that it was a bad idea to gamble away their money, anyway, but they are afraid to leave the game on a sour note. The temptation is to "wait for that next winning streak, and then it's out while the outing is good." The hope is to win back their life savings, at least, so they only have to sell their automobile, and even though there is a risk of losing their house, the risk of having to admit they were wrong is a more immediate humiliation that is therefore harder to confront.

However, when they are having that promised "winning streak," then the strongest temptation is to start believing that the nature of the game has changed, and the compulsive gambler can get led to believe, briefly, that the game is really profitable. Even though they might understand, intellectually, that this is false, the feeling of recent winnings is more immediate and thereby is harder to resist the influence of upon their judgment.

Being in a state of self-denial can feel similar, in some ways, but again, the nature of the similarity is just as ineffable. A person that has been in a state of self-denial for a very long time might have built a large number of mental traps, in their heads, to try to deter themselves from facing the truth. Their very fear of facing something that is hard to face can lead to the creation of a sort of emotional minefield that lies between themselves and confronting what would otherwise be a simple truth.

If you are a zoophile, even a deeply repressed zoophile that is only reading this on the pretense of "watching the enemy," the trick to getting out is to just listen to those people that have already started to come out, not just to themselves but to their families and their friends. Listen to those people that have come out to their moms and their dads. They might not be anymore special than the average person, except the natural bigheartedness that goes with them being the kind of person that has trusting relationships with their families, but that is the point: they are--besides one stupid detail that would not matter in a sane universe--normal.

It might take you a lot of hard work to build up the social connections you need, in order to feel safe about living openly as a zoo.

Change involves letting go of people that you know, without asking, are emotional anchors tied around your ankles. You might have a large network of acquaintances that live their lives based on demonizing and thereby bullying people they do not understand. Your friends might obsess over "calling out" anybody that inadvertently quotes whatever comedian has recently gotten into trouble for giving drugs to women prior to liaisons. Alternatively, you might be in conspiracy theory Hell, and the people around you might be claiming that anybody that doesn't repeat their own beliefs like a mantra is part of some sort of sinister "child-molester cult." You might come from a fundamentalist Christian background that obsesses over spiritual purity. Either way, the society of toxic people is cancer, and while it is hard to let go of them, it is only a matter of time before that stops being just a metaphor.

The social reorientation can be hard, but whether your politics are conservative or liberal or libertarian or "law and order," I don't care about that, for the purposes of this discussion. Healthy people to have in your life are people who know that rage and hate and shaming are not the right way to deal with other human beings. You should never have to feel paranoid or fearful because of the people you call friends.

You should never have to feel so ashamed, of a part of yourself or of something that you believe somewhere in your heart, that you won't even admit it to yourself.

It might take a long time to rebuild the world around you, but it also takes the compulsive gambler a long time to build his way out of debt. It's a lot of long hours working odd shifts that pay that all-important extra dollar and a half an hour.

However, once you get started...I mean really get started in earnest...you can't stop laughing. Self-acceptance is like a glorious marijuana, but it comes from inside. It's your natural high. It's pretty cool.


Be at peace,
Sigma