Or, as a friend put it, “Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel...”

Further (following up on previous post), need to balance my naturally trusting, open, friendly nature with the *need* to protect myself, to not just trust people willy-nilly. People seem to be getting less and less concerned about ‘truth’ and ‘reality,’ and seem to becoming more and more interested in ‘how much can I *get*’ out of this person, or situation. Greed, in other words.

Another Grasshopper saying: “People should *always* be more important than money.”

And: Though I’m reasonably smart, I’m not particularly aggressive (though I’ve become a bit *angry* in the past few years [reasonably so], which, when *not* an aggressive person by *nature*, one has to take a *bit* of care not to turn into a kind of whining pathetitude (? pathetic + attitude? or, ‘patheticness’ is what I was first trying to convey.)

There’s also a massive ‘double bind’ thing going on for me as a woman – I’m *painfully* aware, all the time, in *every* interaction, no matter how small, of the patriarchal, sexist, misogynistic power dynamics going on. I can’t seem to shut the damn thing *off* now that it’s been switched on.

Which means: There’s a little part of me calling bullshit on *me* every time I ‘cave’ to the bullshit patriarchal expectations we’re *all* immersed in (and *most* people seem blissfully unconscious of – and I mean UNCONSCIOUS, in the most brutal, non-complimentary way I can express).

Which makes it *exhausting* to try to function on even though most *basic* levels – every phone call, every *simplest* exchange with *most* human beings seems to take a level of – almost superhuman? – effort that is simply not sustainable.

If I had at least *one* other person in my life who shared the same goals, interests, points of view, understandings, perceptions, etc., I think I could be much stronger.

As it is, I feel like David (as in David and Goliath).

***
Fear is a big one, and patriarchal ‘pushers’ *know* it, and *use* it, every. single. day, hour and minute.

They are fucking *relentless* in their pursuit of power; unscrupulous (isn’t that practically an integral part of the definition of ‘greed’? Sigh. So much studying, so much counter-intuitive [to *me] stuff. Lying down to rest, at least in my *mind*...)