4 Things

[flamingsword]

I am rediscovering celery as a peanut butter delivery system to my mouth, and it is cronch. Excellent!

I love my husband, my boyfriend, my besties, so many of my friends. I have so many more people to love than I used to have. Me: the kid who thought they would be dead or institutionalized by age 30. It’s an uncomfortable realization sometimes, if only because having so much means having so much to lose. Such is life.

I’m going to write a post of relationship bullshit I used to do, and it will have to get cut-tagged for length, but I’mma write it anyway. Bc my friend J reminded me that other people need warnings about the horrible bullshit that your instincts tell you when you have been trained to dislike yourself, and in our culture that’s everyone. I don’t have a single friend that was raised in a fashion I consider healthy who’s over the age of 25. I believe the young’ins are our future.

I watched The Boy And The Beast this evening, and it was almost as good as Wolf Children by the same director, but that’s very good, pretty and deep in places. Ah, anime. So much more grown up than your US counterparts.

Comments

[chemicalcain]

Celery with peanut butter is very good! I love the cronch also. I similarly did not think I would still be here by now, but I am glad to be, both because of big things like all of the people I love, and because of small things like the nice crunch of an apple. (Green apple is also a very good peanut butter delivery mechanism. It's a great way for me to get something that feels like a solid meal full of proteins and vitamins without the effort of cooking.)

[flamingsword]

Yeah, but apples require using knives if you’re dipping them in stuff. And I am not always good for knife use.

[sabotabby]

Bc my friend J reminded me that other people need warnings about the horrible bullshit that your instincts tell you when you have been trained to dislike yourself, and in our culture that’s everyone. I don’t have a single friend that was raised in a fashion I consider healthy who’s over the age of 25. I believe the young’ins are our future.

Oh damn. Good point.

[flamingsword]

Which point? I was kind of rambling there.

[sabotabby]

The one about all of us being raised to hate ourselves.

[flamingsword]

Oh, yeah.

Advertising is really the subtle art of undermining your personhood to make you buy things. The news reports almost exclusively on the actions of the rich and powerful and neglects to mention the actions of everyday people, unions, NGO’s and the charities that are receiving grassroots support - all of which skews our ideas of human importance. Parenting was passively toxic in the US when it wasn’t actively abusive, when I was a kid, and it’s not significantly better now. Churches and schools want you to doubt yourself bc it keeps you in line. The US government has been so busy actively undermining communities that it wants to suppress that it has not considered the knock-on effects of that suppression of human potential. There are so many forces that benefit from our self hatred that we have basically been getting it from every angle since we were tiny. It’s a miracle anyone can lay claim to sanity at all in this environment.

[sabotabby]

Even my mom, a feminist who loves me and raised me as best she could, used to tell me to always suck my stomach in. Constantly. Which I still do.

[flamingsword]

I’m sorry you got programmed with messages to perform physical fitness for other people. I know parents think they are preparing us for a world of judgey people, but really they are installing an internal critic in our brains. They are hurting us in an often-permanent way to keep us from experiencing transient human pain and normal social rejection.

It sucks and you deserve to be as fat and fabulous as Lizzo if you want to.

[sabotabby]

Hah. I don't want to—that's not the kind of thing that is compatible with arthritis and a spinal fusion—but I could do without the internal critic.

[princessofgeeks]

So glad you have so many people around to love and be loved by.

[flamingsword]

💙