#but i can't stop thinking about it bc i can feel my fucking brain shrinking in my skull

[confinesofmy]

most disorienting moment of adam's covid-19 of '23, electric beegalee: last time i was outdoors we'd been experiencing more or less a drought for... like 3 months? with a break or two, maybe? and it was like 80° outside, usually. just went out to check my mail for the first time innn 5 days and nothing looked real because a.) it's been raining and very cold so the landscape really has changed dramatically and b.) my brain bonken. bain boken. bronk brain. i felt like i'd been eating mushrooms. so surreal. had to quit looking after a minute or so so that i wouldn't start crying.

[that-gay-jedi]

I've been saying "Not everything is that deep" to myself for like 10+ years but it actually is ALL that deep.

I like to sit in the woods because they're beautiful. I like the relative quiet, the ancientness and bigger-than-me-ness and aliveness of it all, but maybe I also grew to like the woods bc my parents were afraid of them and kiddie me was afraid of my parents. It's okay if the reason I associate the dark and monsters with safety is that they kept the people and things I had reason to fear away. It's okay if I celebrate this now by wearing all black and embracing various edgy and/or unsettling aesthetics and make it a big part of my personality. It's okay to become more and more of a faggot specifically because it upsets the kind of people who want me tamed and neatly put in a box. Like. Actually it's okay for responses to my living environment to be part of my identity. I can be a creature that lives in a place and has experiences.

I'm gradually figuring out the small things are allowed to be big things. It's okay if the only reason I don't like certain fictional characters is that past abusers liked them. I'm allowed (as long as I don't unfairly take it out on anyone) to get so viscerally angry every time my face itches bc my body remembers that one time a family member who noticed me scratching nose invaded my personal space and startled the fuck out of me based on some dumb superstition. It's okay if shallow things like liking Halloween or hating Christmas come from a collection of small, only moderately impactful personal experiences that gradually congealed into preferences over time and now I feel strongly about them because they span so many things at once.

Like maybe shit is allowed to all come back to one thing and maybe that one thing is my trauma and maybe that's okay and when people talk about not letting your trauma define you sometimes I think there's a fundamental disconnect bc all that stuff was inflicted on me with the intent of turning me into a particular kind of person, the whole reason it was trauma was BECAUSE it defined me, and maybe I should stop thinking it's negative or stupid (or self-centered or short-sighted or whatever other adjective of Do Not Want is applied) to acknowledge that and being told I'm never going to live a full, happy life unless I act in a specific way is probably just replicating my traumas and if acting in a way that's nost natural and freeing also involves a lifelong dialogue with my traumatized wounded animal self that probably just means I'm a living being with a biological brain that I can't alter by just deleting a few lines of code.

I really do feel like a lot of the messages we get about recovering and developing an identity outside of trauma have this unrealistic expectation that you should summon a concept of who you want to be out of thin air and embody it completely unbound from any prior experiences or states of being and that's just no more realistic or healthy than the idea that a physical body needs to have a thigh gap and perfectly flat photoshop stomach. They're both about shrinking yourself to achieve an impossible ideal that for most people is actively harmful if you do achieve it, and all just for the sake of being able to say you Did It Right and/or that anyone else is Doing It Wrong.

Yes, I do get to choose who I'm going to be, but I don't get to make that choice in a vacuum and neither do you and I don't think we should have to make it look like we did.

There were kids in my classes in high school who always got good grades and would vocally claim on a semi-regular basis that they never studied, that all they did was play video games and/or basketball/hockey, and that they never did anything intellectual for fun either. And it was never true. I always wondered why it was so important to them that people think they just magically knew all the material. Why would doing the work be shameful?

And I think I get it now. Nobody wants to be seen as real people who have to either do nerdy shit for fun or actively try in school in order to know stuff. Socially, we're rewarded for making everything seem so effortless and perfect and powerful and individualist that it it's actively unrealistic, you're supposed to be a cloud of mist. It applies as much as having a good relationship or a fulfilling life or a healthy lifestyle etc as it does to getting good grades. It's gouche to be a mere mortal.