Talk:Waking Life/@comment-40234613-20190721231049/@comment-24101790-20190722000414

First things first, I would like to apologize for the line you mentioned above. At the time of writing that (four+ years ago), I had been working in hospital security. One of the patients I was watching over during one of my midnight to noon shifts was a man who suffered from severe depression who (after talking for a while) opened up about his life and some of his struggles. He checked himself in to PA at a point in his life where he felt like he was at risk. Being in a room with him for ten+ hours with nothing to do, but talk led him to open up a bit about himself and gave me a bit of insight into his emotional state at the time. He was going through a lot at the time (and I hope he's gotten some help) and a lot of what he said impacted me heavily.

My goal wasn't really to marginalize or put anyone in a box. I was more influenced by his experience to include a slight aside in this story as my way of remembering him (in some sense I guess) and realizing there are people in this world who have rough times, but are still struggling to keep going. While his issues didn't really stem from his orientation as much as they came from a lack of people in his life who he felt cared about him, biochemical imbalances that he wasn't getting treatment for, as well as an absence of a mental health care system that could help him come to terms with some of his deep-seated issues (his addictive tendencies and his clinical depression) and get treatment/counseling rather than putting him on patient observation for a few hours and a brief conversation with a psychiatrist, it still was not a good idea to reference his struggles or attempt to condense it down to a few lines without giving context.

I've decided to remove the aside in its entirety as I realize I can't really contextualize the person he was in a few simple lines (or really understand him from a few hours of talking if we're being honest) and by attempting to do so, I ended up marginalizing a lot of people unintentionally. Once more, I'd like to apologize. It really wasn't my intention to belittle someone's experience, but nevertheless, I did in attempting to empathize with this person and reference some of the things we talked about. Have a good rest of your night/day depending on where you're living. ~ Travis