junebugwriter

[junebugwriter]

Cryptid hunter who moves to west Virginia to dedicate their life to finding all the guys. Mothman, Flatwoods, all of them. But they get more progressively obsessed. Become primarily nocturnal. Skin becomes pale, eyes become more attuned to the darkness. Isolated. Obsession becomes so all consuming, they start trying to recreate the elements of the famous encounter stories, to get into the mind of the cryptids. Eventually, townsfolk start talking. They become a rumor. They just start being called "the Hunter."

Generations pass, but people still swear they see a gaunt, pale figure with enormous eyes in the woods, in the trees, in the fields, with a shiny camera at their side.

[junebugwriter]

So I have this cool thing where basically my childhood was extremely traumatic and often felt like a literal prison and I'm extremely undersocialised but I learned how to act normal enough to survive my childhood but not how to interact with my peers in normal ways really

and it leads to this really cool thing where the dissonance between how confident and together I seem at some points and the mass of trauma and mental illness that is actually going on under the surface leads to people claiming that I'm not mentally ill but instead intentionally and calculatedly manipulative

and at the same time this really really cool thing happened where in almost total isolation from normal friendship interactions by sharing my special interests online I became moderately successful on social media so the people who are most like me who I would have the best chance of being accepted and held by see me as privileged even though I was on benefits when I started my YouTube channel

so now I have this really really really cool thing where people who I thought were my friends or even loved me actually projected immense amounts of their own ideas about who I should be onto me and never really saw me as a person at all and then took my obviously unwell behaviour as an opportunity to explode my entire life and career while also making it even harder for me to ever make friends again on top of all the trauma and the mental illness and being a trans woman

which gets me to the coolest thing which is where I'm just really lonely kind of all the time and I think about the people who used to be my friends and I can't tell if they were ever actually my friends and I want friends really badly but I don't know if it will ever really be safe for me to make friends and sometimes I think my best option would be to just post "hey does anyone wanna be my friend?" on all my main accounts but that's not going to get me stable healthy platonic relationships with people who see me as a person so I guess I just think about dying really a lot of the time by proportion like I really used to like being alive, just for a minute there after coming out and I didn't think about it, and then the first other trans woman I dated assaulted and hit and threatened me, and then I thought I found people who understood me, and then they told me I was monstrous and now I'm here

And I couldn't recommend it tbh

[junebugwriter]

If anyone believes in redemption, forgiveness, and personal growth, they should be open to it when it actually happens. Nobody deserves permanent exile. At some point, one must respect the dignity of others even if they hurt you. That's basic human decency.

So I have this cool thing where basically my childhood was extremely traumatic and often felt like a literal prison and I'm extremely undersocialised but I learned how to act normal enough to survive my childhood but not how to interact with my peers in normal ways really

and it leads to this really cool thing where the dissonance between how confident and together I seem at some points and the mass of trauma and mental illness that is actually going on under the surface leads to people claiming that I'm not mentally ill but instead intentionally and calculatedly manipulative

and at the same time this really really cool thing happened where in almost total isolation from normal friendship interactions by sharing my special interests online I became moderately successful on social media so the people who are most like me who I would have the best chance of being accepted and held by see me as privileged even though I was on benefits when I started my YouTube channel

so now I have this really really really cool thing where people who I thought were my friends or even loved me actually projected immense amounts of their own ideas about who I should be onto me and never really saw me as a person at all and then took my obviously unwell behaviour as an opportunity to explode my entire life and career while also making it even harder for me to ever make friends again on top of all the trauma and the mental illness and being a trans woman

which gets me to the coolest thing which is where I'm just really lonely kind of all the time and I think about the people who used to be my friends and I can't tell if they were ever actually my friends and I want friends really badly but I don't know if it will ever really be safe for me to make friends and sometimes I think my best option would be to just post "hey does anyone wanna be my friend?" on all my main accounts but that's not going to get me stable healthy platonic relationships with people who see me as a person so I guess I just think about dying really a lot of the time by proportion like I really used to like being alive, just for a minute there after coming out and I didn't think about it, and then the first other trans woman I dated assaulted and hit and threatened me, and then I thought I found people who understood me, and then they told me I was monstrous and now I'm here

And I couldn't recommend it tbh

[junebugwriter]

So I don't know if everyone realizes this, but we all have a "forever box" we mentally maintain. In it you keep the platonic ideal of each kind of bad person, separated away from normal people in order to keep the normal people safe. To be clear, this isn't prison, this is just in your head, a space you keep all the bad people in. To clarify further, it has nothing to do with how you believe that bad things happen in real life. You believe in systems that teach people to behave in cruel ways to each other, you believe in mental health crises that make people act irrationally or in ways people find scary or harmful, you understand the cycle of abuse, and none of that stops you from maintaining a box in your head where all the bad people go. It is an abstract place in your mind, a blindspot in your consciousness, and unless you very intentionally apply the things you believe about how bad things happen in real life, you put people in your forever box when you find out they are a bad person.

It's okay that you have this for yourself. There has to be a space on the other side of all your boundaries where you want someone out of your life altogether. I have people in this box in my head who I know I can't have in my life and it's taken a lot of work to know that that isn't the case because they contain an essential ontological evil. Personal capacity is how you actually determine whether you need to cut someone out or not, but this creates a very murky space.

If you find out that someone used to say homophobic things 5 years ago but stopped, maybe you think that person has had long enough in the box. You don't even think it consciously, you just emotionally sit in the reality that they already, as it were, served their time. Notoriously, white people's capacity to find out that other white people said racist things in the past and decide that they've already learned their lesson is quite powerful, just like straight people's ability to find out someone said or did something hurtful to queer people and decide they've had plenty of reckoning for that already is quite powerful. The trick here is that each observer feels like they're determining how long is long enough but they're actually doing an emotional weighing up of how much this person means to them. Plenty of white people are willing to put other white people who don't mean anything to them in the forever box for being racist and keep them there if they're a person they find distasteful.

Imagine a racist. You just pictured someone you find distasteful. Now imagine your best friend saying something racist. Regardless of whether you would respond by challenging that person, trying to educate them, or ignoring it and pretending nothing happened, the emotional difference here is that you didn't put them in the forever box.

When you are deciding that someone is too inconvenient to have in your life, you will tell yourself that you aren't judging them to be a bad person, that you aren't engaging with the situation on a moral level. When you are explicitly passing judgement on someone and calling them a bad person, you make yourself blind to how you are making decisions based on convenience and capacity. I've had this happen to me, and I've done this to other people. It takes work, sometimes consistent sustained effort, not to turn people into cartoons in your head. Although we know emotionally that bad people go in the forever box, we actually only put abstractions of people there.

Someone who you've abstracted in this way, of course, is just on the other side of an incongruity in social reality, a wall between them and you and whoever shares your perspective and abstracts them in the same way. The forever box isn't actually real unless enough people have been told that you did something bad, and put you in their own box in their heads, and then suddenly it is horribly real, and you are in it. In the forever box you are alone. Crushingly, grindingly, deafeningly alone. You are going to stay here and think about what you've done. This is how the reality of social ostracisation starts to materialise.

Nobody got together to agree on the rules, but the forever box has rules nonetheless:

If you do something bad you go in the forever box.

If you try to help someone get out of the forever box, you go in the forever box. Associating with someone may count as helping them get out.

If you try to get out of the forever box, either by pretending you didn't do anything wrong or defending yourself, you get longer in the box.

Because of rule 1, we always know that people in the forever box are bad people. This is reassuring, but it drives the need for rule 2. Rule 2 creates a social pressure that leads to rule 3.

Rule 3 exists because when you don't personally put someone in your forever box but you know that other people say they're a bad person, you know that standing near them may result in you getting disappeared as well, and so any time the person talks or acts in a way that might be seen as evading or refusing punishment, your fear of that increases and sometimes this will result in you vanishing this person from your own life.

Here I want to explain the idea of having a "sentence" in a space that I've said is forever. This is an effect of the scaling of people's personal boundaries into a social force. If you were entirely cut out by 5 people, but they were the only people you knew, the amount of time that you would spend completely alone is the time until you make new friends, which might not be that hard especially if the 5 people who stopped speaking to you were concentrated together, for example roommates in a flatshare. On the other hand, if 1000 people all swore you off as a bad person, for example an entire neighbourhood or a school, it would at first be very difficult to meet people who didn't share their perspective.

This is why social cliques, like in high school, that put pressure on all their participants to have the exact same view of someone are able to rapidly exclude and isolate someone for whom opinion shifts, but the obviousness of this is also what keeps everyone in the clique under control - that's the rules of the forever box working.

People who derive emotional security from the use of the forever box need the forever box to keep working, and in some cases need for it to never ever ever have been used incorrectly, unjustly, and this means that listening to anyone in the forever box, discussing the legitimacy of them being in there, or sometimes even acknowledging that the forever box exists is unacceptable.

For bigots, the desire to drive marginalized people out of public life is putting the entire group into a forever box. When I said at the start of this that the forever box isn't prison, that was a bit of a fib, because prison is very literally manifesting a physical reality of our shared imaginary bad person space, with sentences to serve painstakingly decided by a lengthy legal tradition and a whole set of professionals so that people can believe in some kind of justice being achieved by putting people there.

When people have been in prison, their access to employment, education, democracy, stable housing, food, healthcare, social rehabilitation are all permanently damaged unless there is incredibly intense work undertaken to fix them, and even then they're unlikely to ever be rich or famous or widely respected unless they were already those things before they went into prison. This is the forever box in everyone's heads working in tandem with the carceral system. There is a full spectrum of partly realised systems of punishment between the abstraction of the forever box in your head and the physical reality of a prison cell, and all of them serve to reinforce class divisions.

When marginalised people describe a sense that bigots want them all locked up, or deported or in camps or just plain gone, this is because they feel the direction of this social pressure, the pressure of disappearance, like a wind that blows softer or harder against them. It is so easy for people not in that marginalised group to dismiss this as exaggeration because they don't feel the wind blowing that way at any speed.

Social media (as in, the specific and intentional design of modern social media platforms) provides us with tools to caricature, abstract and alienate each other, and just like the punitive logic of prisons this functions as a way to use our energies on becoming more divided and so easier to control by the ruling class. At the same time as it makes us more reactive and ready to insult and misunderstand and then ultimate block each other, the people who find it easiest to group together and stick together are the people who feel thrown away and judged - this drives both the modern reactionary trend on social media and the famous "why I left the left" right-wing pivot of canceled celebrities.

What is the point in outlining all of this? Well firstly, to challenge how power currently exists in the world we have to understand how people turn to punitive methods for a sense of justice, because the power that a social system has is often granted to it by people's willingness to believe it can bring them justice. Secondly, once we understand the difference between setting your own personal boundaries and trying to make someone else suffer, we can talk about a better way to create something like justice in response to harm. Then, thirdly, if we can put that into practice in real terms and not turn to the impulse for punishment, we can create a society people actually want to live in rather than one people are scared of being excluded from.

[junebugwriter]

So I don't know if everyone realizes this, but we all have a "forever box" we mentally maintain. In it you keep the platonic ideal of each kind of bad person, separated away from normal people in order to keep the normal people safe. To be clear, this isn't prison, this is just in your head, a space you keep all the bad people in. To clarify further, it has nothing to do with how you believe that bad things happen in real life. You believe in systems that teach people to behave in cruel ways to each other, you believe in mental health crises that make people act irrationally or in ways people find scary or harmful, you understand the cycle of abuse, and none of that stops you from maintaining a box in your head where all the bad people go. It is an abstract place in your mind, a blindspot in your consciousness, and unless you very intentionally apply the things you believe about how bad things happen in real life, you put people in your forever box when you find out they are a bad person.

It's okay that you have this for yourself. There has to be a space on the other side of all your boundaries where you want someone out of your life altogether. I have people in this box in my head who I know I can't have in my life and it's taken a lot of work to know that that isn't the case because they contain an essential ontological evil. Personal capacity is how you actually determine whether you need to cut someone out or not, but this creates a very murky space.

If you find out that someone used to say homophobic things 5 years ago but stopped, maybe you think that person has had long enough in the box. You don't even think it consciously, you just emotionally sit in the reality that they already, as it were, served their time. Notoriously, white people's capacity to find out that other white people said racist things in the past and decide that they've already learned their lesson is quite powerful, just like straight people's ability to find out someone said or did something hurtful to queer people and decide they've had plenty of reckoning for that already is quite powerful. The trick here is that each observer feels like they're determining how long is long enough but they're actually doing an emotional weighing up of how much this person means to them. Plenty of white people are willing to put other white people who don't mean anything to them in the forever box for being racist and keep them there if they're a person they find distasteful.

Imagine a racist. You just pictured someone you find distasteful. Now imagine your best friend saying something racist. Regardless of whether you would respond by challenging that person, trying to educate them, or ignoring it and pretending nothing happened, the emotional difference here is that you didn't put them in the forever box.

When you are deciding that someone is too inconvenient to have in your life, you will tell yourself that you aren't judging them to be a bad person, that you aren't engaging with the situation on a moral level. When you are explicitly passing judgement on someone and calling them a bad person, you make yourself blind to how you are making decisions based on convenience and capacity. I've had this happen to me, and I've done this to other people. It takes work, sometimes consistent sustained effort, not to turn people into cartoons in your head. Although we know emotionally that bad people go in the forever box, we actually only put abstractions of people there.

Someone who you've abstracted in this way, of course, is just on the other side of an incongruity in social reality, a wall between them and you and whoever shares your perspective and abstracts them in the same way. The forever box isn't actually real unless enough people have been told that you did something bad, and put you in their own box in their heads, and then suddenly it is horribly real, and you are in it. In the forever box you are alone. Crushingly, grindingly, deafeningly alone. You are going to stay here and think about what you've done. This is how the reality of social ostracisation starts to materialise.

Nobody got together to agree on the rules, but the forever box has rules nonetheless:

If you do something bad you go in the forever box.

If you try to help someone get out of the forever box, you go in the forever box. Associating with someone may count as helping them get out.

If you try to get out of the forever box, either by pretending you didn't do anything wrong or defending yourself, you get longer in the box.

Because of rule 1, we always know that people in the forever box are bad people. This is reassuring, but it drives the need for rule 2. Rule 2 creates a social pressure that leads to rule 3.

Rule 3 exists because when you don't personally put someone in your forever box but you know that other people say they're a bad person, you know that standing near them may result in you getting disappeared as well, and so any time the person talks or acts in a way that might be seen as evading or refusing punishment, your fear of that increases and sometimes this will result in you vanishing this person from your own life.

Here I want to explain the idea of having a "sentence" in a space that I've said is forever. This is an effect of the scaling of people's personal boundaries into a social force. If you were entirely cut out by 5 people, but they were the only people you knew, the amount of time that you would spend completely alone is the time until you make new friends, which might not be that hard especially if the 5 people who stopped speaking to you were concentrated together, for example roommates in a flatshare. On the other hand, if 1000 people all swore you off as a bad person, for example an entire neighbourhood or a school, it would at first be very difficult to meet people who didn't share their perspective.

This is why social cliques, like in high school, that put pressure on all their participants to have the exact same view of someone are able to rapidly exclude and isolate someone for whom opinion shifts, but the obviousness of this is also what keeps everyone in the clique under control - that's the rules of the forever box working.

People who derive emotional security from the use of the forever box need the forever box to keep working, and in some cases need for it to never ever ever have been used incorrectly, unjustly, and this means that listening to anyone in the forever box, discussing the legitimacy of them being in there, or sometimes even acknowledging that the forever box exists is unacceptable.

For bigots, the desire to drive marginalized people out of public life is putting the entire group into a forever box. When I said at the start of this that the forever box isn't prison, that was a bit of a fib, because prison is very literally manifesting a physical reality of our shared imaginary bad person space, with sentences to serve painstakingly decided by a lengthy legal tradition and a whole set of professionals so that people can believe in some kind of justice being achieved by putting people there.

When people have been in prison, their access to employment, education, democracy, stable housing, food, healthcare, social rehabilitation are all permanently damaged unless there is incredibly intense work undertaken to fix them, and even then they're unlikely to ever be rich or famous or widely respected unless they were already those things before they went into prison. This is the forever box in everyone's heads working in tandem with the carceral system. There is a full spectrum of partly realised systems of punishment between the abstraction of the forever box in your head and the physical reality of a prison cell, and all of them serve to reinforce class divisions.

When marginalised people describe a sense that bigots want them all locked up, or deported or in camps or just plain gone, this is because they feel the direction of this social pressure, the pressure of disappearance, like a wind that blows softer or harder against them. It is so easy for people not in that marginalised group to dismiss this as exaggeration because they don't feel the wind blowing that way at any speed.

Social media (as in, the specific and intentional design of modern social media platforms) provides us with tools to caricature, abstract and alienate each other, and just like the punitive logic of prisons this functions as a way to use our energies on becoming more divided and so easier to control by the ruling class. At the same time as it makes us more reactive and ready to insult and misunderstand and then ultimate block each other, the people who find it easiest to group together and stick together are the people who feel thrown away and judged - this drives both the modern reactionary trend on social media and the famous "why I left the left" right-wing pivot of canceled celebrities.

What is the point in outlining all of this? Well firstly, to challenge how power currently exists in the world we have to understand how people turn to punitive methods for a sense of justice, because the power that a social system has is often granted to it by people's willingness to believe it can bring them justice. Secondly, once we understand the difference between setting your own personal boundaries and trying to make someone else suffer, we can talk about a better way to create something like justice in response to harm. Then, thirdly, if we can put that into practice in real terms and not turn to the impulse for punishment, we can create a society people actually want to live in rather than one people are scared of being excluded from.

[junebugwriter]

I honestly could read Sophie's thoughts on carcerality and the psychology of the carceral state, but I really think all of you should give this a read too. She's cooking here. On that Foucault shit, but evolving it, and developing it for the digital space.

#philosophy

So I don't know if everyone realizes this, but we all have a "forever box" we mentally maintain. In it you keep the platonic ideal of each kind of bad person, separated away from normal people in order to keep the normal people safe. To be clear, this isn't prison, this is just in your head, a space you keep all the bad people in. To clarify further, it has nothing to do with how you believe that bad things happen in real life. You believe in systems that teach people to behave in cruel ways to each other, you believe in mental health crises that make people act irrationally or in ways people find scary or harmful, you understand the cycle of abuse, and none of that stops you from maintaining a box in your head where all the bad people go. It is an abstract place in your mind, a blindspot in your consciousness, and unless you very intentionally apply the things you believe about how bad things happen in real life, you put people in your forever box when you find out they are a bad person.

It's okay that you have this for yourself. There has to be a space on the other side of all your boundaries where you want someone out of your life altogether. I have people in this box in my head who I know I can't have in my life and it's taken a lot of work to know that that isn't the case because they contain an essential ontological evil. Personal capacity is how you actually determine whether you need to cut someone out or not, but this creates a very murky space.

If you find out that someone used to say homophobic things 5 years ago but stopped, maybe you think that person has had long enough in the box. You don't even think it consciously, you just emotionally sit in the reality that they already, as it were, served their time. Notoriously, white people's capacity to find out that other white people said racist things in the past and decide that they've already learned their lesson is quite powerful, just like straight people's ability to find out someone said or did something hurtful to queer people and decide they've had plenty of reckoning for that already is quite powerful. The trick here is that each observer feels like they're determining how long is long enough but they're actually doing an emotional weighing up of how much this person means to them. Plenty of white people are willing to put other white people who don't mean anything to them in the forever box for being racist and keep them there if they're a person they find distasteful.

Imagine a racist. You just pictured someone you find distasteful. Now imagine your best friend saying something racist. Regardless of whether you would respond by challenging that person, trying to educate them, or ignoring it and pretending nothing happened, the emotional difference here is that you didn't put them in the forever box.

When you are deciding that someone is too inconvenient to have in your life, you will tell yourself that you aren't judging them to be a bad person, that you aren't engaging with the situation on a moral level. When you are explicitly passing judgement on someone and calling them a bad person, you make yourself blind to how you are making decisions based on convenience and capacity. I've had this happen to me, and I've done this to other people. It takes work, sometimes consistent sustained effort, not to turn people into cartoons in your head. Although we know emotionally that bad people go in the forever box, we actually only put abstractions of people there.

Someone who you've abstracted in this way, of course, is just on the other side of an incongruity in social reality, a wall between them and you and whoever shares your perspective and abstracts them in the same way. The forever box isn't actually real unless enough people have been told that you did something bad, and put you in their own box in their heads, and then suddenly it is horribly real, and you are in it. In the forever box you are alone. Crushingly, grindingly, deafeningly alone. You are going to stay here and think about what you've done. This is how the reality of social ostracisation starts to materialise.

Nobody got together to agree on the rules, but the forever box has rules nonetheless:

If you do something bad you go in the forever box.

If you try to help someone get out of the forever box, you go in the forever box. Associating with someone may count as helping them get out.

If you try to get out of the forever box, either by pretending you didn't do anything wrong or defending yourself, you get longer in the box.

Because of rule 1, we always know that people in the forever box are bad people. This is reassuring, but it drives the need for rule 2. Rule 2 creates a social pressure that leads to rule 3.

Rule 3 exists because when you don't personally put someone in your forever box but you know that other people say they're a bad person, you know that standing near them may result in you getting disappeared as well, and so any time the person talks or acts in a way that might be seen as evading or refusing punishment, your fear of that increases and sometimes this will result in you vanishing this person from your own life.

Here I want to explain the idea of having a "sentence" in a space that I've said is forever. This is an effect of the scaling of people's personal boundaries into a social force. If you were entirely cut out by 5 people, but they were the only people you knew, the amount of time that you would spend completely alone is the time until you make new friends, which might not be that hard especially if the 5 people who stopped speaking to you were concentrated together, for example roommates in a flatshare. On the other hand, if 1000 people all swore you off as a bad person, for example an entire neighbourhood or a school, it would at first be very difficult to meet people who didn't share their perspective.

This is why social cliques, like in high school, that put pressure on all their participants to have the exact same view of someone are able to rapidly exclude and isolate someone for whom opinion shifts, but the obviousness of this is also what keeps everyone in the clique under control - that's the rules of the forever box working.

People who derive emotional security from the use of the forever box need the forever box to keep working, and in some cases need for it to never ever ever have been used incorrectly, unjustly, and this means that listening to anyone in the forever box, discussing the legitimacy of them being in there, or sometimes even acknowledging that the forever box exists is unacceptable.

For bigots, the desire to drive marginalized people out of public life is putting the entire group into a forever box. When I said at the start of this that the forever box isn't prison, that was a bit of a fib, because prison is very literally manifesting a physical reality of our shared imaginary bad person space, with sentences to serve painstakingly decided by a lengthy legal tradition and a whole set of professionals so that people can believe in some kind of justice being achieved by putting people there.

When people have been in prison, their access to employment, education, democracy, stable housing, food, healthcare, social rehabilitation are all permanently damaged unless there is incredibly intense work undertaken to fix them, and even then they're unlikely to ever be rich or famous or widely respected unless they were already those things before they went into prison. This is the forever box in everyone's heads working in tandem with the carceral system. There is a full spectrum of partly realised systems of punishment between the abstraction of the forever box in your head and the physical reality of a prison cell, and all of them serve to reinforce class divisions.

When marginalised people describe a sense that bigots want them all locked up, or deported or in camps or just plain gone, this is because they feel the direction of this social pressure, the pressure of disappearance, like a wind that blows softer or harder against them. It is so easy for people not in that marginalised group to dismiss this as exaggeration because they don't feel the wind blowing that way at any speed.

Social media (as in, the specific and intentional design of modern social media platforms) provides us with tools to caricature, abstract and alienate each other, and just like the punitive logic of prisons this functions as a way to use our energies on becoming more divided and so easier to control by the ruling class. At the same time as it makes us more reactive and ready to insult and misunderstand and then ultimate block each other, the people who find it easiest to group together and stick together are the people who feel thrown away and judged - this drives both the modern reactionary trend on social media and the famous "why I left the left" right-wing pivot of canceled celebrities.

What is the point in outlining all of this? Well firstly, to challenge how power currently exists in the world we have to understand how people turn to punitive methods for a sense of justice, because the power that a social system has is often granted to it by people's willingness to believe it can bring them justice. Secondly, once we understand the difference between setting your own personal boundaries and trying to make someone else suffer, we can talk about a better way to create something like justice in response to harm. Then, thirdly, if we can put that into practice in real terms and not turn to the impulse for punishment, we can create a society people actually want to live in rather than one people are scared of being excluded from.

[junebugwriter]

evergreen

[junebugwriter]

✨SHINE GET✨

[junebugwriter]

I'll add to this with my own experience with abuse. I was in a deeply toxic and emotionally abusive relationship right out of undergrad. It isolated me from so many people, even my family. When I broke it off, I was a wreck. I admit often that I should not have jumped into the next relationship so quickly because even a decade later, I'm still undoing the mental damage that abusive relationships did to me.

I'm glad I have that new relationship, the one with my wife! But I also should not have gotten in so quickly. It takes time to heal, and healing often doesn't feel good.

Idk if this is just me taking notes for an imaginary do-over life or if anyone else will actually benefit from this but I'll say it anyway

If you escape an abusive relationship you have to take time to move through the trauma, and diving into multiple new relationships is not going to help even if it feels good. Feels good and healing are not the same thing.

My abuser threatened me on multiple occasions, physically attacked me multiple times, lied and manipulated me constantly, and all that was an enormous trauma load to be carrying and not one that I should have brought into having several relationships at once and doing extreme kink right afterwards. It is really hard to learn the lesson that "feels good" and healing are not the same thing, but it's so deeply necessary. Feels good and healing are not the same thing.

I wasn't well before I got into that relationship either. I'm only just starting to get into how my childhood was with my therapist now and I've been seeing her for like a year and a half. But I'm not trying to say that having any trauma whatsoever means you should avoid relationships, just that kind of intense very fresh very recent trauma is something you need to sit with for a while

[junebugwriter]

Ok but in fairness, there's nothing more nerdy-transbian-coded than transitioning nearly a decade later than you probably should have, under circumstances where non-transfems question the legitimacy of it

so you know, the metanarrative of HS2 keeps winning in that sense

[junebugwriter]

Begging trans women to understand that not only is solidarity with other trans women everything, but trans women who have no solidarity are a fucking danger to you, and trans women who are part of the officer class are taught from birth not to have solidarity

[junebugwriter]

[junebugwriter]

[junebugwriter]

please donate to sami’s family if you can. the cruelty of israel allowing palestinians to have false hope with the “ceasefire” only to tear the rug out from under them can’t be understated—and that’s in addition to the murder, rape, torture, and more committed by israel day in and day out. sami’s family has already been through far too much. consider using “little treat” money on a suffering family.

[junebugwriter]

I hope that the person who needs to see this sees it.

If you are trying to ignore all your own boundaries to be everything to everyone, and people see you as someone who is going to fix all their problems, they're going to resent you when you don't. You might think that's fine because it's a them problem not a you problem, but when you inevitably mess up because you're a human being and you hurt someone in some way, the people who feel like you let them down by not being their mommy enough are gonna make it your problem really fast

I am in the process of trying to relearn many basic social skills while also putting my life back together after having it completely exploded and nearly 2 years out from being disposed of publicly I'm just now grasping this as a felt sense in my body: if people don't see me as a person and only see me for what I can do for them, they are unsafe people for me to be around.

When you ignore all your boundaries to try to give everything to other people, you setting boundaries is treated as violence, because they are used to you not having any.

[junebugwriter]

[junebugwriter]