Hello steemians! My name is factionless and I'm not on anyone's side except everyone's! I've been using steemit for months now, but I finally decided to get into posting after getting over the worry that my posts won't be good enough or that my perspective isn't valuable enough. They say you shouldn't worry about the money, or even being widely received, so I'm just going to try and have fun with it and share my thoughts on the interesting things I see in the world.

Scroll to the end if introductions bore you and you just want to see what I expect to post about! I promise I won't mind!

I was born in Texas, and spent quite a lot of time travelling while growing up, as well as a few years living overseas in the middle east. My parents moved us back to Ohio, and this is where I ended up spending most of my youth. Most would consider living in an upper middle-class family, being able to travel the world for vacation, and having intelligent and caring parents to be a pretty ideal situation. However, for some reason I quickly went from being a happy child, energetic and full of dreams and aspirations, to an apathetic teenager, who was more and more disillusioned with life by the day. My mind was full of negativity and all I could focus on was the seemingly endless suffering that existed in the world, as well as how much it all gets swept under the rug so that middle-class westerners can live comfortably without having to think those awful thoughts. While there is truth to this notion, there were quite a few loose ends to my perspectives and allowing myself to be emotionally crippled by these thoughts was debilitating. Music, video games, and a couple of friends was enough to keep me afloat for awhile, but I was knowingly descending the downward spiral that Trent Reznor described.

I had considered suicide for years by the time I was 15 and didn't have too much concern for my health, my future, etc. I was actually very excited to get into using drugs because I had fully accepted that I needed more powerful escapes from the real world. This quickly led to my first experience with the police when I was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana and adderall (ADD/ADHD medication). The judge saw a young boy abusing a prescription drug and gave me a litany of fines to pay and two years of hair testing for illicit substances. The whole situation left me with an extreme distaste for police and the legal system.

What initially felt like a curse became an important turning point in my life. With the magic of the internet, I was able to figure out that there were plenty of psychoactive substances that were not illegal, some that were illegal but impossible to test for, and some of mixed legalities that were very easy to order on Amazon or other trusted marketplaces. In what might have been the most fortunate series of events in my life, the first substance I came across was a rather strong dose of orally active DMT (some might call it ayahuasca). I had read that it was extremely useful for treating depression, anxiety, addiction, and plenty of other neurological issues, so with no real experience with psychedelic drugs (or drugs in general really), I dove in head first, and had the most profoundly life-changing experience I've ever had, even nearly a decade later.

In one night, I felt like I had become a new person, with an overflowing positive outlook. The old, apathetic, suicidal me who was a slave to his cynical thoughts and a society that keeps people complacent in their self-hatred, died a gruesome death, and a new me who had learned to love and empower himself was born. And like a newborn, I was introduced to a new world I'd never seen before.

Seeing the world in this new and inspiring way made me reevaluate everything I knew. My newfound appreciation for life and my experiences seeing different people of the world coming together to live in so many different ways are almost certainly what led me down the path of studying anthropology, the study of humans, which opened my eyes to even more amazing facts about the nature of life and who I am. These experiences also certainly led me down the path of libertarianism, and eventually anarchy. After accepting that there were countless ways people could choose to live, I also came to accept that no one person or group has the authority to dictate how others live.

So to begin to bring this introduction to a close, this is the short version of how I became factionless. It's a made up word that describes my feelings on spirituality, philosophies, teams, or any other way people collectivize themselves. If you are engaged in spaces dedicated to discussing anarchy, you will quickly find out that anarchists divide themselves into several schools of thought, as is common in different philosophies. I don't really have a problem with exploring different philosophies and even titling them or naming different aspects within them so it's easier to discuss these thoughts. However, I don't think I will ever go as far as identifying myself as an anarcho-capitalist, anarcho-communist, or even as an anarchist for that matter for a couple big reasons that are two sides of the same coin. 1: I believe it's bad for me to consciously subscribe to a group of people's convictions on a school of thought because I might blindly agree just to keep myself consciously associated with the idea the collective supposedly stands for. 2: I believe it's bad for others to collectivize me with those who might share one word in common with me, but hardly anything at deeper levels, and it only hinders communication when someone assumes they understand my philosophy and are unwilling to have a discussion because of it. I care about all living things and try to keep that in mind as people divide themselves and each other onto different sides.

So here I am on steemit! Ready to explore my thoughts more by sharing them and hopefully discussing them with other users. I spend a lot of my time playing music, travelling, using psychedelics (a lot of my time compared to most people), attending art-centric events, and reading about my many interests. I've more recently gotten into trading cryptos, learning programming, and small-scale construction. I expect to be creating posts about anarchy, anthropology, video games, psychedelics, spirituality, technology, music, art, philosophy, all of their intersections, and whatever else I come across that I think is worth sharing my thoughts on.

Cheers steemit, and thanks in advance for welcoming me into the world of decentralized social media!