what was the first media that you can consciously remember scaring the piss out of you and giving you nightmares (examples listed are specific to me I was a cowardly ass child)
You are not childish for wishing the world was better than it is. We were owed that by the people who knew better before us, just like we too will owe the people who’ll come after us. But defeatism does nothing. It puts nothing on the plate you’ll hand to your child, your friend, your lover. You may never live to see the world become as good as it should, but that should never stop you from trying to improve it anyway.
My current plan to recover from my mental and emotional existence is to just go so deep into being insane that I’ll come out sane on the other side. Being a chronic people pleaser plagued with impostor syndrome stretched me too thin, and that leash simply snapped and I am now a completely untethered, unapologetic vermin.
Fuck having impostor syndrome, if I’m not entitled to be here they should’ve barred the doors better. If I’m doing everything wrong because of imaginary rules that nobody told me about, that’s their problem, you should have made your confusing system more idiot-proof.
I’m not here to please everyone and do everything right. I’m here to make bad art, chew on furniture, make people laugh, cook awful food and look at pretty landscapes, and piss off the people who don’t want me to exist. If I have an unseen infinite debt somewhere that I can never pay back, I’m going to keep running that tab until I die. I’m alive purely because the universe is shit at pest control.
i never thought “i’m alive purely bc the universe is shit at pest control” would be my motivation of the day but damn this dude went hard
okay i’m curious bc my parents were relatively young having me but idk what age difference is “normal” between parents and kids as i’ve met people with plenty of variations. so if you want, reblog this and tag (don’t comment) how old your parents were when they had you. my mom was 25 and my dad was 21.
me up until i was 24 and a half: i don’t think i’m autistic, i just get easily obsessed over things and struggle to follow conversations and don’t like to make eye contact and fidget with things and have issues with lots of food tastes and textures and miss social cues and don’t like unexpected change and plan out how to respond to things in advance so i’m not caught off guard and daydream a lot and struggle to make friends and spend a lot of time by myself and ramble constantly and stress out in unfamiliar social settings and don’t like loud noises and shut down when i’m overwhelmed and am very rule-adherent and like patterns and systems and have very particular ways of doing things and am clumsy and don’t like to be touched and wear the same kind of clothes every day and have a lot of neurodivergent friends and am generally considered kind of a weird person.
being autistic is beautiful and then you’re afraid of abandonment because your brain has picked up on the exact patterns that signal another loss and then you step outside and there are patterns in the sky in the grass in every touch and every laugh. someone looks at you and there is a shift in their gaze to tell you “i know you’re wrong. you are something wrong.” something between pity and embarrassment and you want to rip it out of your body for a second and then you listen to music and the euphoria makes it all worth it because they could never experience this joy. you’re sky-high. you look in the mirror and your eyes appear inexplicably vacant and then you read about how so many autistic kids are cleverer than everyone else as children and then the opposite afterwards. at a certain age you equalise. you grow sharper teeth and you bite off more than you can chew and you chew it all anyway. there’s spring in the air and your brain functions like a scattergraph and when you think about it hard enough it’s impossible not to fall in love. if you’re an alien you’re a lovely one. one day you fall in love and you know it’s more intense than it should be but you love her anyway, knowing how it will end. are you invented for grief? are you invented for love, carrying grief?
truthfully being autistic puts a gun full of love to your head. i will always be a little bit more alone than everyone else but the shades of green seperate into a spectrum of feeling and this schematic of an engine is a poem to progress and every song i love is a holy hymn and when your brain is a scattergraph, once you love something, you love everything. you’re more alone than everyone else and the least lonely creature on earth, even in isolation.
6 hour workday maximum i’m not kidding, if it can’t be done in that timeframe it doesn’t need doing.
this doesn’t apply to jobs like childcare
If i worked in childcare and my 6 hours were up i would start putting babies in ziploc bags and shipping them to Turkmenistan listed as endangered fruits and vegetables
because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you’re just supposed to … know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you’d been doing the right thing. she’d asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.
you aren’t supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don’t, but then you’re too serious. you’re not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you’re too quiet. you aren’t supposed to get passionate about things, but then you’re shy, boring. you aren’t supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you’re not good at replying.
you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is “selfish” and what is “charity,” you give yourself over, fully. you’d rather be empty and over-generous - you’d rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you’re mean. since you don’t know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what’s happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.
don’t fuck up. they’re all testing you, always. they’re tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn’t get to attend - everyone else just… figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you’ve been playing catch-up. you’ve been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they’re telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you’ve totally read it.
if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.
you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you’re doing, and you automatically say i’m good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:
how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you’re piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is… just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you’re cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it’s working!
