I miss my own innocence.

All the times I was innocent in the past.

When I was a young person in college who used to meet another young man on a hill and we would talk about our lives and just be nice to one another, that was innocent. His name was Chris and he had a girlfriend who was a massage therapist and for some reason we would meet and chat between classes. I feel like that was rare and special experience now. I think he was interested in hearing about my life and trips down to South America, the time.

And later, the innocence that one can experience about the idea of having children. Just thinking it might happen and that it would be what was supposed to be. I don't believe in that now. I feel wiped out, but also like a survivor, as if a flood swept away my home and all of my possessions. I feel the horror. I feel the coldness and the self-absorption and immaturity of some people when it comes to have much they center their own experiences and how little they care for others. They refuse to consider others. They just can't seem to do it. How much they feel entitled to exclude others. They need fables. These were society's fables that I had to break away from. These were tall tales. The tales excluded too many. These were not my fairy tales. They are still what others must cling to, but they're not for me.

(The thoughts above came out with many tears. The thoughts below came after that, with not so many tears.)

These belief systems say that you are better if...

You are better if you have kids. You are better if you can get more people to listen to you. You are better if you can get people to buy your stuff. You are better if you make more money. You are better if you lose more weight. You are better if you go to parties more and smile and post pictures online about it. All of it feels like lies, and I don't know how people got sucked into going along with it. All of these people who have those things still rely on others' labors in order to get through their days, and they don't seem to want to think about that, most of the time. 

It feels stranger and stranger as time goes by that people don't want to think about it. It feels like immigrants in concentration camps are not being cared for enough because of these kinds of patterns that people get sucked into going along with. I am shocked. There are children in those places. How can a society that really cares about children forget about certain ones? Maybe if I am shocked, maybe it means there's a part of myself that is innocent, still.

Maybe I feel like my experiences are ignored and forgotten by Society like children who get locked away in detention centers are ignored and forgotten by Society. Maybe that's what I need to figure out. What is it about the structures in Society and in people's minds that make that kind of forgetting feel normal and acceptable to them?