#cishet men feel the need to yell at me when im just existing

[verved]

I hate being catcalled so fucking much

[mmoxie]

this post got long im yelling about nerds added a readmore after the fact

sometimes i read a phrase and get a little hung up on it and today’s phrase is “emotional depth”

you spend 20 years growing up as a very confused and upset person in rural north carolina and you come out of that experience with, let’s say

fairly shallow means of expressing yourself

but i say that to say that i’m so grateful that i found out who i am and took the time to like, think about it

but sometimes i have really shallow dumbass reactions to/interpretations of things still, here five years after getting out of all that

and what i want to get at is that a culture of reaction RELIES on that shallowness to succeed- it doesn’t need or want to reach deep into your psyche, it wants to start you out with your primordial fight or flight reflexes right there at the surface so they can just provoke you into reactionary behavior

and honestly you can read that whole last paragraph as just “and this is why cishet dudes bad” if you want because frankly thats what theyre wrapped up in

that’s why we have these conversations where it’s like “you shouldn’t have to be convinced to care about others, robert” or “it doesn’t make sense to fly into a violent rampage over sports, jake” or “other people don’t punch walls when they’re confused, mike”

the reactionary movement that exists right now has reached an inch underneath that surface, found the bottom, and said “hey mike they’re telling you not to punch walls, are they in charge of you?” and mike, with no enrichment in his life, suddenly feels he’s super right about punching walls because that’s the message he’s just received and he suddenly has an opponent to his wall-punching instead of someone in his life who he might, if he wasn’t such a shallow, violent dipshit, mutually talk to about problems, because friendship features that sometimes, but he wouldn’t know because his friendships all revolve around the kind of mindlessly cruel shit that ender’s older brother does in that homophobe’s book about child soldiers and xenophobia

before i digress too hard let’s whip back around to emotional depth because here’s the thing

shallow emotional depth is more or less the same thing as shallow intellectual depth, in that it limits the way you can interact with the people around you in a way that leaves you vulnerable to all kinds of shitty influence

think of any unwashed walking 2.1 GPA named Gavin you ever knew who talked a big talk about how smart he was but refused to treat himself any better than the bare minimum because he’s getting his enrichment elsewhere

and by elsewhere, i mean 4chan, where he was conversing heatedly with other “intellectuals” all night and getting shitty sleep because someone on /lit/ thinks that some volume of naruto is better than a book he hasn’t actually read but he feels a strange personal obligation to defend because of the hallowed halls (that he hasn’t attended) that the book allegedly represents

that’s someone who has mistaken having lots of opinions for a certain kind of depth, they’ve cultivated an ability to react to everything by always being ready to be contrary to anything, taking the side of a fucking ghost instead of anything in material reality every time if it means they get to run their mouth

that’s the same damn thing, beat for beat, as Big Lloyd who everyone thinks is great at football but he’s always warming the bench because he gets too aggro on the field and has to be called off and replaced near about every game even though he’s “fine” during practice, except he’s getting his ghosts from his dad and his coach instead of anonymous “intellectuals” online

shallowness is shallowness and what it rounds out to is an inability to play ball with other people, and it’s not something you’re a victim of, it’s something you settle into, something you get comfortable with, something that satisfies you in the most fleeting kind of way, you’ve always got to to do it again, you’ve always got to heat up and lash out because god knows it’s the only way you get to express yourself to anyone anymore and that’s

bad

for you

and for them

and for anyone in a ten foot radius

and this isn’t all to say that it takes depth of intellect or depth of emotion to be a good person it’s to say that we’re all digging the same damn hole and finding pieces of ourselves in it, and there’s no reward for digging a shallow hole and laying in it, you’ll never find anything new, you’ll never change, and maybe other people dig deep enough and in so many different directions that they’ve got connecting tunnels and whole networks and there you are, on the surface, gone from them, so removed from their experience that you can’t relate to them anymore even though you started at the same depth

and then someone comes along and says “those people deeper down are FUCKERS and you’re not missing anything” and you BELIEVE IT because it means you don’t have to dig, and you’re comfortable not digging

and everyone else who made that decision is comfortable too and then all of them get together and decide that those fuckers and their useless nuance and willingness to converse and openness and communication and warmth are Doing This All Wrong and it’s time to Teach Those Fuckers A Lesson

and then what do we get

we get shallow, awful men, who see someone in a stressful public position explaining something, and they read the explanation, and none of it resonates with them, and based on the very first sentence they pose a question contrary to the entire premise of what’s being said

and when their tactic of aggressively delivered complete nonsense fails to land and they’re dismissed for being stupid dipshits

well, that’s a victory, because all they know is punching and punching back, and you got punched and didn’t punch back, so they won

and i am just so mad and i just hate so much that i see this every single goddamn day of my life whether it’s in person or it’s online and i don’t HAVE a solution to this it just fucking sucks

it was established by shallow dipshits at the dawn of time and their shallow dipshit sons have upheld that tradition ever since

ironically in the name of a total lack of depth in their person the roots of their behavior are some of the deepest i’ve ever seen and that

makes me wanna yell, and yell, and yell, until i die

but because i have this blog to vent on, i won’t, and i’ve gone and expressed myself now, and gotten it out of my system, and i’m fine