#i genuinely cannot reframe it to understand that

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for telling my sister that I didn't find her instagram post funny and that I didn't want her to send me things like that again?

I (32f) have never had a good relationship with my sister (34f). We have gotten somewhat better over time, but we have always had a strained relationship. We are about as opposite as you can be. Social rights issues? No compromise. ACAB? Constant disagreements. Politics: best never mention them. TV Shows? No interest at all. Music? We cannot stand each other's music. We genuinely have nothing except our blood and the fact we were raised by the same people in common.

I am currently in the process of finishing my PhD and live on a different continent to her. We have been vaguely trying to talk and maintain a cordial friendship from afar.

For the past four months I had been preparing for a conference that I was organizing, leading, and moderating. It was a massive project that will be a huge part of my dissertation research, and it went very well. The day after the conference I had a long career planning discussion with some academic advisors, and spent about three hours talking in my second language with my own advisor. The combination of everything left me genuinely exhausted to the point that I woke up the day after it all still too tired to move.

After I woke up, I realized I had a text from her containing an instagram link - no comment, no notes, no context, just the link. I know I wasn't in a perfect headspace and still needed more sleep, but I clicked it because usually she just spam sends me instagram videos about random baby rearing things she finds funny. I don't find any of them amusing, but tolerate them because she seems to enjoy it. I usually just nod my head or offer a few responses to show I've seen it and move on.

But this video was different. This video was, as far as I can tell, an influencer attempt at selling an AI. It had a young woman walk into a classroom with the onscreen text describing how "my professor is the same age as us and she has her phd!" and when she was asked how she got it, the video shows how the "teacher" went onto Youtube, put Youtube videos into this AI which created an algorithm to summarize the video. It ends with the words "University is a joke in 2024".

I was....genuinely offended. After everything I had been through working on this conference and with years of thesis work, I was just hurt. I watched it a few times, trying to understand what it was even trying to say, and could come up with no good reason for why she would just send it to me. So I wrote back to her "idk how you even want me to respond."

She said she thought it was funny, and I asked her if she understood why I wouldn't find it funny. She wrote back "because you lack my sense of humor smh." I tried explaining why I was upset and reframed it in the context of her job. She doubled down that she thought it was funny, but that it was because she thought it was amusing anyone would think they could get any kind of degree like that.

I explained that AI is genuinely a problem in universities right now and that our students are using it to get through their classes and it's causing a lot of chaos with profs trying to crack down on it. Then I told her it felt like she sent me something just to annoy me.

The argument continued from there. I asked her not to send me stuff like that again, and she asked how she was supposed to know I would be triggered by an AI video, and that I was being oversensitive, and how it was my fault for always assuming that she is plotting to piss me off and that she can never show an interest in my life without me having a "feelings dumpfest" and calling her out for being a bully.

I don't understand how she could think sending a video to me saying "university is a joke in 2024" with no context at all would be taken as a joke in the first place. And I felt like if I didn't tell her I didn't like this kind of video and why it made me upset she would keep sending things like this to me I'd have to keep seeing and ignoring future posts.

AITA for telling her I didn't think it was funny and to stop?

Should I have just ignored it and gone back to sleep? (At this point that's what I felt like I should have done...)

What are these acronyms?

[1yyyyyy1]

If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you? I get the sense that you’re older based on your posts, but going by your most recent post, you seem to imply that you’re still a teenager. If that’s true, I am very impressed by how knowledgeable you are at such a young age.

How did you get so articulate? What did you read? Did you take classes in high school? Did you have a mentor? did you have a life-changing conversation with somebody? I would love to know more about your process of getting to where you are now.

Hey :) I'm kind of surprised that people choose to compliment me at all since I'm calling people names on here and such, I think I'm a nasty person overall... I'm in my early twenties currently, so I'm certainly not a teenager, but I'm still at an age where my opinions get dismissed and it has taken me significant effort to start taking my concerns seriously. In the post you are referring to, I was talking about people who equate polarizing opinions to those of an immature teenager, which hints at the fact that people grow out of their rebellious phase and expect others to become just as compliant with age… I don't consider my opinions (especially on pregnancy) to be rebellious in the first place, to me they are common sense and I'm genuinely disgusted by the fact that many adult women continue to perpetuate the same rhetoric that has harmed me as a teenager.

I've never received any higher education, and I barely ever attended high school, so if you find my writing skill compelling it can be the proof that all you need is yourself and a willingness to learn. I'm not sure if I what I have is innate talent because I did read a lot as a child, which probably explains my vocabulary, and I'm not exactly a prodigy since my early writing is still as primitive as it gets for someone who is just starting out. My writing process is not effortless either and I go through a lot of drafts or even variations of the same sentence until I'm satisfied with it. What I know to be innate to myself is my overall interest in reading and writing, it is something I spend a lot of time doing and my proficiency makes sense to me that way. I suppose, I'm still not at my fullest potential because I limit myself to mentally taxing topics... Much of the difficulty I encounter comes down to the fact that the things I talk about are extremely personal and often require more reflection from me than I'm ready for; this is the reason I'm yet to post some of the questions I promised to answer. When it comes to my writing skill, I would be lying if I said that public education did nothing for it because it did lay down the foundation, just that I draw my understanding from other subjects and cannot recommend a reading list because I was taught them in person. My approach to writing is based on my knowledge of cognitive reframing and I would have to write a book myself to explain how I apply it. Weirdly enough, I attribute my eloquence to fanfiction since it's what I used to read the most of, and some of it is genuinely high quality — for example, I think this story is very poetic, especially the last paragraph. The same can be said about fantasy games where I would pay attention to the flowery language in quest text and dialogue; my learning experience has been unconventional at best.

I thought it would be helpful if I recited what I do directly... My writing process is as follows:

Receive a question or get interested in an idea, draft the first thing that comes to mind. Write until I don't feel like it anymore. Usually this is no longer than one sentence.

Come back to the draft when I feel like it and let my imagination run its course while I look at the prompt. At this point, the draft is a mixture of coherent ideas and incoherent sentence stumps I then proceed to flesh out within the confines of the main topic. This is the stage where I figure out the structure and the general theme of whatever I'm writing. I narrow down the essence of what I'm being asked about, write until I figure out the closing paragraph, break down the draft into connected sub-topics and come up with a title for each paragraph as well as the entire piece. For this answer, I titled the first paragraph "Why I wrote what I did and my attitude towards it", the second & third paragraph "My education and writing process" and the fourth paragraph "My advice and why I haven't given up yet". I titled the answer as a whole "My age and my writing process" which is kind of odd, it probably means there's something I have to reflect on in regards to my age... While drawing up a plan like that is common writing advice I would give regardless, grounding myself with a simplified idea is even more important to me because I do not write sentences consecutively. The first draft of the previous sentence quite literally was "is important to me because I do not write sentences consecutively." with the dot, meaning that I knew it would be the last part of the sentence and that there was something I was supposed to trace it back to before I could finish it. This goes for the entirety of my writing process and I will often start a sentence from the middle, write different paragraphs one sentence at a time or even write an entire paragraph backwards. It can be hard to keep track of the structure when you write the way I do, so having a grounded idea I can always refer back to is the solution for me.

Continue to refine the draft along the guidelines I established until I'm satisfied with it — this doesn't mean that it's perfect even by my own standards, I often leave awkward wording as is because I know when to move on from a creative block. What matters to me is that it communicates the ideas of the sub-topics and fully conveys my point.

The most important thing I've learned ever since I committed to writing is that I am at my best when I write for myself. I would go as far as to say that I'm at my best when I write about myself, that way I absolve myself of the responsibility that accompanies external topics. I no longer burden myself with articles and statistics which may or may not be inaccurate, I talk about my own improvement and I know what it has been well enough to not be bothered by people disputing it. Even as I'm answering this question, my focus is on my personal enjoyment so that it remains the motivation I can look back at; I don't believe it to be remotely unfair, it is reliable. People move on and people get disinterested, my audience could leave due to personal circumstances and it would be no one's fault. By being my own standard of quality, I get to be consistent with my work and both me and the reader benefit that way. Other than that, my straightforward advice is to trust the process and to not be afraid to take risks with your writing. Stylistically, the list I made has to be limited to impersonal descriptions to be consistent, but I went on a personal tangent in the second point anyway — so what? Taking this liberty was what inspired me to finish the list at all, which I'm not going to complain about. I take a risk every time I choose not to dilute my complicated speech, like right now, because it does come off as pretentious, although no one has complained so far. Generally speaking, there are no real social risks to be taken with writing because intelligence is already hard to come by, the people who value it will appreciate the effort regardless and the people who don't could never be catered to in the first place. The only "risk" I can imagine anyone taking is the risk of being disappointed in one's abilities and the fear of never amounting to one's aspirations, but even that is temporary because creative skills always improve so long as you practice. I'm personally well past the point of doubt because people have seen me at my worst too many times by now, that ship has sailed for me... My aspirations rely on my ability to articulate myself, so I don't lack motivation when it comes to improvement. The enjoyment I get from completing a piece allows me to persevere through the many challenges the writing process entails.

[impishtubist]

Sirius chaos anon back for more (not a native english speaker BTW, please forgive my typos):

I think that Sirius Black is one of the only characters to genuinely challenge the system in HP. I called him anti-autoriteran for a reason: he knows people in power that everyone think are right can be wrong, and that everyone can make mistakes. He’s the only one to challenge Dumbeldore’s opinions and show mistrust of him without being outright vilified. However the Narrative karmically forces it to be a mistake every time, and punishes him for it. He’s the only character to challenge the idea that goodness isn't an inherent character trait but something you must choose, work on, and question over and over again. He knows good people can make bad and even evil choices.

The systems failed him time and time again. In his abusive upbringing, in failing to adress the growing threat of the death eaters, in never giving him a trial, in ignoring his mental and physical needs as long as they can use his property. He has no reason to trust people in power have his wellbeing in mind.

He is not stupid, far from it, he probebly is the best critical thinker in the cast. He was so deeply traumatized by injustice it’s literally the core of his personality and what kept him sane in Azkaban. He knows actions have consequences more them most others, but still chooses the subversive path because he trusts his own judgment more than the authority. I fully believe that’s why he needed to be killed at Ootp, and reframed post-mortem.

Bonus: If anyone thinks that a flighty, stupid, and spoilt person that needs tough love comes from an overtly abusive home: you have no idea how human psychology works. choosing as a kid do openly oppose you parental abuser and discured the ideologies and identities they push is a sign of personality who deeply mistrust power and an unwillingness to give yourself over even for the price of safety. That's why common fanon wolfstar makes no sense to me.

However, the closer to the cannon iteration of Remus would be attractive to him, in my opinion. Not only because he's a living proof of how wrong everything he was taught about werewolves is, but because he can identify with the position of being told he is bad because something intrinsic he cannot control and having to prove his goodness over and over.

Yes, all of this! You're especially right about Sirius being the only critical thinker in the cast, and yet the narrative forces him to be wrong/punished for it each time.

Wolfstar is so interesting when you stick to their canon selves! I will never understand fanon Remus, or the fandom obsession with him.

[illegalbootjeggingoperation]

"It makes me sad when people leave the church but I keep loving them anyway."

I understand where you're coming from, but let's talk about why this sucks.

"it makes me sad when people leave the church"

There's no better way of telling someone "I know what's best for you and it isn't this." Are you sad when a friend takes you to lunch and doesn't order the same thing as you? No? Then your sadness isn't over a difference of opinion. It's over what you perceive as a naive, ill-advised life choice. You're telling them they're in the wrong while framing it as a feeling so they can't disagree.

Don't do this. Don't put yourself above them. You're allowed to feel how you feel, but expressing it this way is not about your feelings. It's about reminding the person that you're wiser than them, you've made better choices than them, and you hope they will come to their senses.

"I don't mean it that way," you protest. I know that and hopefully the person you're talking to knows that. But it's still harmful.

It doesn't matter if you think you're being self-centered or not. If you do the things a self-centered person would do, you are self-centered.

Repeat after me: "there are valid reasons to leave the church, even if I don't understand them."

And again: "leaving the church is the right decision for some people even if I don't feel it's right for me."

When you can look me in the eye and say those things genuinely, then I can be interested in what you have to say. Until then, please stay out of my decisions.

"but I keep loving them anyway"

This reads as "you've made a decision that hurts me but I am the bigger person so I'm forgiving you."

I cannot emphasize enough how much someone leaving religion has nothing at all to do with you. It is not your place or your right to be offended by it. They are not harming you. You are not a stakeholder. Religion is a heavy personal decision that can affect every aspect of someone's life. It would be deeply inappropriate for you to make it about yourself. You, your family, and your congregation are not part of it. You don't get to weigh in, you don't get to critique, you don't get to make up stories about how it happened. It didn't happen to you; you just happen to know about it.

I keep loving them is a way of making it all about you.

"Isn't that better than the alternative?" Sure, it's better than not loving them. But even phrasing it as a conscious choice is hurtful. Loving someone is a hard choice if they've attacked or abused you. It is not a hard choice if they've made a personal decision about their own life.

So what should you say?

"I respect their decision" is okay, but the subtext (and sometimes the explicit followup) is "even though I disagree with it." Remember how you don't get to weigh in here? It's not your place to validate or invalidate someone else's religious choices. Your "disagreement" is not relevant. It's gratuitous and selfish.

"I support them" is better, but vague and often performative. Do you really? How do you support them? Do you speak of the acceptability of their choice and the soundness of their decision-making? When you hear someone making up a story about how the person "fell into sin" or "was tempted by the world," do you shut them down?

Do you include them just as much as you did before?

"I believe them" is best. But it requires you to hear their story, to listen without offering advice or trying to reframe their experience. It requires you to empathize. It requires you to imagine yourself being in their shoes and making the same decision, even if the thought frightens you. That's what respect and support look like.

Maybe you can't offer that. It takes a lot of humility and internal work. Okay, then: prepare to spend the rest of your life in utter silence about the issue. Because how can you speak about something you don't understand? And how can you understand something you aren't willing to experience, even in your imagination?

Leaving religion was the most painful, lonely, difficult thing I've ever experienced. But I had to do it. After years hanging on by tooth and nail, using up every excuse, every argument, every philosophy I could muster, in the end I had to leave or I would not survive. It wasn't fun and it wasn't naive. It was necessary.

So don't tell me it makes you sad. You think I have room for more sadness in that part of my life? You think it's my job to hear your shallow and inconsiderate pity? Please.

And don't tell me you "still" love me. There is no "still." If you don't love me now, my fullest self, the way I am meant to be, then you never did.

[letsgotosaturn]

a thought floated in my mind. i cannot feel deeply for another person anymore. or maybe i’ve never been endowed with such capacity anyway. all this time i’ve only been projecting projecting projecting myself in others and when finally i realize that it doesn’t work, that i’m just naive, that i can never understand how to be genuinely kind, i become far more self-centered.

on the other hand though, i’m starting to accept the narrative (thanks movies) that you can never truly know a person inside out but that shouldn’t be a reason to not care for them 

Exhibit A

"I didn't truly understand her--or at least some crucial part of her. And it may well end that way now that she's dead and gone. Like a small, locked safe lying at the bottom of the ocean. It hurts a lot."

"But Mr. Kafuku, can any of us ever perfectly understand another person? However much we may love them?”

- setir mobilku

Exhibit B

“She says even though we love each other, she'll never know everything about me, and I'll never know everything about her. It's just the way it is.“

- yuk, yuk

i always felt that it is a prerequisite. but i guess it’s just my way of delegating my own task, of trying to understand and accept who i am, to someone else. for the most part, i felt uncomfortable being in my own skin. maybe i’m too harsh on myself though; some gentle comments from closest people i rely on have actually made me believe that. again again again i come back to this. just a typical i know my problem i know what i should do, i just need to be reminded. 

ok circling back to my ego problem laid out at the top. i think i’m just too engrossed in feeling like i’m a bad person and just accept that i am not kind simply cause i can’t fully understand a person, feel what they feel. there’s supposed to be a difference between empathy and sympathy, shit i forgot which is which but one refers to understanding/acknowledging other people’s feelings from my own lens, but not sharing the feeling through and through. i think it’s sympathy [yep just googled. sly baastard]. there’s a distance in sympathy, and come to think of it maybe it’s more respectful that way. or at least that’s the first response for any major events that happens to who you consider friends. 

so yea maybe not empathizing is fine, and i shouldn’t act like i know how they’d feel anyway because what i’d be doing is exactly projecting my feelings. whatever the ingredient is. most likely it’s my own personal view/experience and what i think movie characters would do. jess & det asked when i wailed to them, respectively, once “do you want me to listen or do you want me to give a solution?” iya ini gak apple-to-apple with the whole sympathy empathy thing hahaha just popped up in my head. but by acknowledging a number of variables, like the ever changing role you play in a person’s life, understanding that distance will always be there because you’ll never know a person by the book, could be nice [read: BEING REALISTIC]. i’m lucky to have felt i was surrounded by people who care enough, who knows how to help me dissect and reframe my problems.. knowing that they know makes me feel like imparting a bit of me, that i matter enough. i wish i could have reciprocate. i dont think i have the ability to ask the right questions to help, to even dare to ask a person whether they’d want me to listen or to give a solution. always felt like all i can do is feeeeeel and not elaborate on my feelings hence to only rely on that every time a person confides in me or worse, project them to people. but i guess i’m taking a step back now - not offering anything revolutionary, just to tell them i’m there. i think i finally get it, a little too late.

[aro-culture-is]

romo-favorable aro culture is feeling guilty and alienated and hurt when romo-repulsed aro's talk about hating romance and feeling left out and like a traitor for no reason

I don't want you to feel like i'm speaking over your experience but: romance favorable aros are still aro. There's nothing traitorous about having a different experience. No two aros have the exact same experience and these differences strengthen our community.

A community is not a group of identical people: it is a group of different people with some commonality who stand in solidarity. Not despite our differences, not in spite of our differences, but because our differences enrich our experience and display the wonderful elegance of random circumstance bringing us together.

[comradekatara]

thinking abt how the first time u watch the first atla episode, it rly sets you up to dislike sokka. like, the narrative is immediately established from katara’s pov, and katara is clearly the Special One, the Destined Hero, who has “magical powers” and all these good qualities like being hopeful and brave and wanting to save the world through a whirlwind adventure, virtues that all kids who love epic fantasy stories immediately identify with. and sokka is immediately set up......as kind of a dick.

katara blows up at him, telling him, “you are the most sexist, immature, nutbrained—im embarrassed to even be related to you!” and when she says he’s “on [his] own,” it seems like this tirade has been pent up inside her for years. like she’s finally snapping after putting up with his shit for too long. but in hindsight, from sokka’s reaction, and also just what we know about katara and sokka’s relationship as established throughout the rest of the show, it’s actually far more likely that katara goes on this sort of rant at least twice per day, which is why sokka just sits there, mildly bored (until the iceberg starts cracking, that is, at which point he shows genuine concern), because oh there katara goes again, just her scheduled morning tantrum.

and I’m not saying that katara is wrong to yell, oh certainly not; there is never a wrong time to yell at one’s sibling, especially if he just said shit like “leave it to a girl to screw things up” (an infuriatingly provocative statement if ever I’d heard one—which righteously angry feminist teen girl wouldn’t take that bait, I ask you?) but the fact of the matter is, katara frames their relationship as sokka being annoying and irresponsible while she does “all the work,” which is decidedly wrong.

of course, one cannot blame katara for feeling this way. the death of her mother was extremely traumatizing, especially for her, considering she literally died to protect her, and katara bore the responsibility of having to be her own mom, not to mention the burden of being the last waterbender. she felt the need to provide a sense of stability and hope in her family and among her village through both emotional and domestic labor. sokka, on the other hand, spent all his time training to be a capable warrior, and trying in vain to train the extremely young boys of their village to be warriors too.

this habit of his is initially framed as irrational, mere masculine posturing. but as the series progresses, we come to realize that sokka was never being immature or irresponsible, goofing off “playing soldier” while katara did “all the work.” almost immediately, we see why sokka spent so long training to fight, and it’s because he is literally expected to be the last and only line of defense against a vast, destructive imperialist power that already wiped out most of his people.

the first few scenes we get of sokka, in which he’s being kind of a dick to his sister (though his “magic water” rant and his expectation that only women do laundry, while obviously wrong, are also more understandable once we come to understand more of his worldview) do not exactly frame him in a positive light. I know very few people who watched the first episode of atla and did not come out with the takeaway that sokka is annoying.

but on a second viewing, once we genuinely learn who sokka is, and why he is the way he is, all of his actions are suddenly reframed, and he no longer seems like such a useless asshole. kind of a dick, maybe. but his skepticism and cynicism and fear in the face of change no longer seem so unearned; they no longer seem like glaring character flaws, especially when contrasted with katara’s wide-eyed idealism and openness.

as a child watching atla for the first time, we immediately identify katara as the hero of the story: she is powerful, hopeful, brave, and righteously angry. and of course, these qualities of hers are indeed wonderful and inspiring. she is every bit the hero the narrative sets her up to be. she was, and still is, a role model for me. but sokka was never as flawed as the first episode makes him out to be. as an adult watching atla, it’s clear that sokka is the Older Sibling, and he’s not actually irresponsible at all. but he is tired.

[wariocompany]

Hey can you groovespost i totally forgot to ask you to

DJ Grooves is the best character in A Hat In Time. This is objectively true. If you disagree I will report you for racism and terrorism and pornographic content. I do not EVEN care.

What I like most about his personality is the element of subversion. To be clear, Moustache Girl hating Hat Kid is a turnaround, but I wouldn't call it subversive because it's established within, at most, about 45 minutes of playtime that she doesn't like you, and the player has the rest of the game to get used to the idea. Hence her being the final boss of the game is, in my eyes, not a great surprise. Moreover, while I cannot personally attest to having felt this way while playing, I garner that many players see the friendship break-up coming. I played it with my Dad, for example, and the moment he heard Moustache Girl speaking he said "I think she's bad news". In this sense, I wouldn't call Moustache Girl's arc a subversion of audience expectations.

Grooves is different. Half of Chapter 2 is dedicated to him. In this time, it is thoroughly established that Grooves is nice, an ally upon which Hat Kid can depend - egotistical, to be sure, but a kind soul who cares for Hat Kid. It helps that he is incessantly placed in juxtaposition with the far meaner Conductor, who, for all his popularity, is well known to be an asshole. To give you an idea of what I mean, have a look at this comment, with which 1,500 people agreed:

Ironically, I've been unwavering in my assertion that the core thesis of this comment - that Conductor is the ideal villain for Chapter 2 - is wholly incorrect (I even gave this comment a thumbs down...). However, I use this not as a demonstration of my idea's validity and rather as a showcase of what the average person who plays AHIT thinks of the two characters' personalities, where their relationship with Hat Kid is concerned.

Funnily enough, I do feel that this comment still proves my point. Grooves being the villain feels like a complete 180 because we're led to believe he's fond of Hat Kid. And, to be clear, I do believe he is. But! That is, in fact, why him being the villain makes so much sense. Subverting our preconceived notions to reframe the way in which we retrospectively perceive Grooves' behaviour is the point!

Think of it this way. Twists, especially twist villains, are best executed when we don't initially see it coming, but upon reflection, we understand all the clues were staring us in the face.

I wouldn't go so far as to call Grooves' potential for becoming a villain subtle but rather, initially unexamined. Grooves mentions that he's on a "terrible losing streak, and [he] just [has] to win this next Annual Bird Movie Award". While he certainly doesn't call the Conductor swear words and racially discriminate against him, it's not as though he compliments him, either (settling for a moderate "your movies are terrible, and I choose not to comment on you as a person at this time"). He's enamoured enough with the splendour of the TABMA trophy replica to stare at it lovingly, monologuing about it, even when (he assumes) no one is listening.

A relentless desire to win gold, and the genuine conviction that his opponent's films are second-rate, uninteresting, and repetitive - these established character traits are spun to become more sinister when he becomes the twist villain. That is, he would do anything to win and simply hasn't had the means to do so until now ("I could've used these Time Pieces a long time ago, and I knew I couldn't pass up the opportunity to crush one"), and the Conductor beating him despite making bad films is because he's cheating, therefore deserving his awards forcibly taken away from him.

Perhaps this would have been more predictable in another context. But. An evident desire to win, and a perceived artistic superiority over the Conductor, is easily ignored as potential signs for something more sinister. This is because

1) He's contrasted with the Conductor, who is comparatively such a blatant asshole that Grooves is saintlike in the players' eyes (especially considering that Grooves loses every year and is bullied by Conductor, meaning he has a resolve of steel if he is still a nice person)

2) He simultaneously shows that he is a kind, fun-loving, and dare I say it, groovy guy. The hitherto established dichotomy between people who are nice to you and people who are boss battles (up to this point - MafBo and potentially Snatcher; Moustache Girl is not a boss yet) means players assume a character that has your best interests at heart could not become a villain.

I don't think A Hat in Time has good writing. I don't mean this as an insult - no one plays a 3D platformer for the writing, and to say it in a demeaning manner would be as logical as lamenting that an English dictionary does not contain good advice on how to speak Chinese.

This fact notwithstanding, you really have to commend how the Grooves twist is handled. By giving him a narrative foil as intense and nasty as the Conductor, warning signs about Grooves go unnoticed. By making him a kind individual, players are encouraged to ignore what could go awry in the relationship. It's pretty damn brilliant.

Plus, before the addition of Bow Kid, he was the only Black-coded character in the game! So that's a bonus!

[thevirgodoll]

How to get over someone when they are the only person around and you are literally lonely and alone without theirs presence? Or just how to not tie my happiness with a person? I’m really not doing good

It’s actually not as bad as you think to depend on yourself. Being self reliant means you can depend on yourself and as a result, other people will find you more pleasing to be around.

You have to become comfortable in your own skin and learn how to stop being emotionally dependent. If you’ve been in codependent relationships and friendships, this may be why you have thought 100% reliance on another person was healthy.

No friend or partner should complete you. You are a complete person with complete attributes, and so is another person. They should simply add to your life. That is it.

It’s not good to rely on another person for guidance, reassurance, and clarification all of the time. Doing so objectifies them and makes them a tool that can fix your every problem.

1. You are responsible for your own feelings.

No one else is responsible for what you feel. You have to take accountability. It’s not anyone’s job to serve happiness to you on a platter.

Letting someone else’s actions control your every mood is a recipe for disaster. It can make one thing the other person does ruin your entire day. You’re giving your power to another person, and this will follow you in every friendship and relationship if you do not take accountability for your own problems.

2. You are responsible for your own growth.

A marker of growth is introspection. The ability to self reflect is crucial to your growth, and if you are looking to other people to validate everything for you, you may never get where you want to go. You have to discover yourself on your own terms, and by feeding into another person, you don’t have time for yourself.

You’re the only you you’ll ever have, so to waste time projecting your desires and dreams onto someone else is futile. Other people have their own needs to fulfill. You have to reframe your relationship with other people and yourself. The expectations you have created with other people is quite unrealistic, because it’s not another person’s job to be everything for you.

3. People don’t owe you everything.

You have to learn that we aren’t inherently owed anything in life. People don’t owe you a response when you deem fit, for example. They have their own lives, and you have yours as well.

On another note, people change, and can become incompatible. No one inherently owes you anything, except respect and decency.

You have to be appreciative of things and people in your life and understand that every moment is valuable. This appreciation should never morph into idolization.

You have to learn to look inward for solutions, because you know yourself best. Over time, you should know how to solve your own problems, and you should know to look at yourself first.

Blaming other people will never lead you to a positive outcome, because you’ll be waiting for them to give you the perfect solution. Instead of waiting for someone else to show up for you, you have to show up for yourself and validate yourself.

4. Loving yourself is not a waste of time.

A waste of time is worrying about everyone else and what they’re doing. Most people are too busy with their own lives. You do not want to be emotionally dependent for the rest of your life, because you do not love yourself enough. By being emotionally dependent, your needs aren’t met and you fail to meet them as well.

You need to practice these things:

•understanding your needs and how you can meet them

•pampering yourself

•inspiring yourself

•embracing solitude and embracing self reflection

•allowing yourself to be vulnerable with yourself, free of judgment

•be compassionate with yourself

•know the difference between realistic desires and unrealistic desires

•learn to recognize infatuation versus genuine attraction

•learn to recognize fear of abandonment

•practice shifting your focus away from things you truly do not need

5. Let go of your need to control others.

Recognize that it’s okay to be angry with what has happened, but there is nothing you can truly do. You can either do something reasonable within limits to improve the situation, or you can accept it for how it is. Your need to control others can limit your requirement to take better care of yourself. Which leads me to

6. Take other people off of pedestals.

Looking at people from a view of idolization can do more harm than anything else.

Change your thought processes.

•”My problems aren’t as important” vs. “My problems are equally as important as theirs”

•”This person is probably always right so I’m wrong” vs. “This person is like me, sometimes right and sometimes wrong.”

•”I am nothing without this person” vs. “They add something enjoyable to my life, but I believe in myself and I trust myself. If they leave, I will be okay with myself.”

Avoid idealizing anyone to a savior extent. Nobody is your savior, nobody needs to save you. Think of Cinderella by the Cheetah Girls.

You are rescuing yourself, you are making yourself the best you can. If you idealize someone, you escape reality, and that is something we cannot do. Wishful thinking sometimes can hurt you. The more you can do for yourself, the less you need others to do things for you - it’s more so an addition to your life.

If you find yourself interested in someone who shows little interest, engaging with someone who is emotionally distant, holding out hope for your idealization of who they are but they haven’t changed, or that you’re the only one doing anything for the dynamic, then you have to acknowledge the truth and take accountability. Let everyone be responsible for themselves rather than you taking responsibility for someone else. Don’t think in black or white and all or nothing thinking such as “If I don’t get what I want from them life is meaningless” just because of one person. You have to regard yourself higher than that.

You have to be determined in order to develop self reliance. It takes time.

Your job is to now:

•find things that make you feel good in life - new hobbies and activities

•accept that alone time is a normal part of life, and embrace it

•reframe your negative relationship with yourself

•learn to stop creating unrealistic expectations in your head of other people that cause you to need extreme amounts of reassurance and validation

•practice thinking rationally instead of extremes... “He/she broke up with me because I’m ugly...” versus “We broke up because it wasn’t meant to be. Now, I can work on myself and so can he/she”

•make a list of progress that you’re making, make a list of goals you want to achieve for yourself, make a list of things you want to change

Eventually, you will be so busy with yourself, you won’t have time to entertain ideas of “happiness being another person”. Cut out all ideas of this person, and let them live their life. Let go of any refusals to be happy. You have to tell yourself you’re going to do your best in spite of what may be happening. Go through my confidence tag and let yourself live! Be gentle, be kind, and know that it takes time, but it will be worth it.

[recurring-polynya]

Hey this is for our Redhead's bday. Its like a fluff and angst with a happy ending. Is it possible to make a Renruki based on Hanahaki disease? Do you know about this fanfic trope? Its like a person who doesn't know or think their love is requited, will cough up petals. They can only be saved with a confession or accept that they cannot be together with their love interest. I don't want it to sound too morbid. Let me know if its possible.

Wikipedia description for better understanding:

Hanahaki Disease is a fictional disease where the victim of unrequited or one-sided love begins to vomit or cough up the petals and flowers of a flowering plant growing in their lungs, which will eventually grow large enough to render breathing impossible if left untreated. There is no set time for how long this disease lasts but it may last from 2 weeks to 3 months, in rare cases up to 18 months, until the victim dies unless the feelings are returned or the plants are surgically removed. There is also no set flower that blossoms in the lungs but it may be the enamoured’s favourite flower or favourite colour. Hanahaki can be cured through surgical removal of the plants' roots, but this excision also has the effect of removing the patient's capacity for romantic love. It may also erase the patient’s feelings for and memories of the enamoured. It can also be cured by the reciprocation of the victim's feelings. These feelings cannot be feelings of friendship but must be feelings of genuine love. The victim may also develop Hanahaki Disease if they believe the love to be one-sided but once the enamoured returns the feelings, they will be cured. In some literature, other symptoms can be fever, uncontrollable shaking, loss of appetite, low body temperature, and hallucinations. Even after curing, with or without surgery, there can be irreversible damage to the lungs and, although very rare, in some cases the disease cannot be cured.

Ha ha ha, of course I have heard of Hanahaki disease, my brain is 100% rotted by fanfic.

I. hate. Hanahaki disease. It is probably my #1 most hated trope, up there with every single soulmate thing that treats love like some sort of inescapable destiny and strips the characters of any agency. To me, falling in love may be more or less involuntary, but the choice of whether or not to pursue it is the very crux of romance.

In any case, I was just going to... not do this one, except that I walked around mad for half a day and then wrote this up in, like, two hours. This sounds terrible, but this is actually an ideal day for a writer! I am really happy with how it came out! Thanks for the prompt!! I mean this with absolute sincerity!

Warning: Bad language, because Renruki aren’t any happier about any of this than I am.

Read on ao3 or ff.net

🌺   🌺   🌺  

“How the fuck,” asked Rukia, “did you get that into my house?”

Sitting on Byakuya’s good tea table was a heavy green glass bottle of Rukongai’s worst rotgut. And two saucers.

Sitting cross legged and cross on the other side of the table was Abarai Renji.

“I told the captain it was necessary. Sit down.”

Usually, Rukia would take being ordered around like that as an invitation to call him names, but there was something angry and serious in Renji’s tone, so she sat instead, and let Renji pour each of them a saucer of something that smelled like lamp oil. Silently, they tossed back their drinks.

“You want to tell me what this is about?” Rukia asked as Renji refilled.

Without speaking, Renji pulled a carefully folded handkerchief out of his kosode and slid it across the table.

Rukia’s hands clenched into fists.

“Go ahead,” Renji said offhandedly, sipping his sake.

She didn’t want to. She knew what it would be. But she did it anyway, reached over and flipped open the handkerchief to reveal a handful of mangled, half-rotted flower petals. Hot rage ran through her veins. “Are you going through my trash now?” she demanded.

“No, I asked the captain to,” Renji replied coolly. “I assume he had someone do it for him, but he didn’t say.”

“Fuck you,” Rukia snapped.

Renji stared at her, his eyes cold and angry. “That night we camped in Hueco Mundo. Before we caught up with Ichigo and the others. You coughed up half a camellia and a good inch of stem in your sleep. I… figured we had more pressing concerns at the time, but I asked your brother to keep an eye on you after we got home.”

Rukia took a gulp of her drink. “Well, congratulations, Detective Abarai, you cracked the case. You’re so smart that I’m sure you know how these things end, so we don’t need to discuss it.”

Renji squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and then opened them again. “It doesn’t… it doesn’t have to be a death sentence, you know?”

“It’s complicated,” Rukia grumbled. “I’m not explaining it to you, but it’s not… solvable, and I can’t… I won’t give up. Not this time.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Renji continued, his voice quieter. “There are ways to… manage it. Live with it.”

Rukia’s brows furrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s a disease of the soul, y’know, not the body, which is why humans don’t get it. With a strong enough will, you can keep it in check. The key, the thing that really lets it get ahold of your lungs, is when you start to lose hope.”

“You want me to live in denial, then?”

“No, not quite. But there’s some… techniques. We live a really long time, Rukia. Things may seem one way now, but… but who’s to say how they’ll be in sixty or seventy years, right? I mean, it’s not easy, but if you can imagine sort of… jarring up your feelings and packing them away for later.”

“Like pickles.”

“Yeah, like pickles.”

Rukia finished her saucer and reached for the bottle.

“Another thing that works sometimes is to try to…” Renji gestured helplessly. “Reframe it. I’m sure you’ve read poems about courtly love.”

Rukia made a face. “I fail to see how reading old-timey thirst poetry about wasting away from wanting to sleep with someone else’s wife is going to help anything.”

Renji’s face took on a pained cast. “Yeah, I guess some of them are like that. But being in love with someone who doesn’t love you back doesn’t mean your life is...meaningless. There can be something really beautiful and noble and sorta romantic in and of itself about loving with no hope of reciprocation. That you can still be of… of service to a person, even if they never notice you.”

“Renji, that’s fucking nonsense,” Rukia informed him, topping up his drink as well. “Where do you get these ideas?”

“Or you can just really absorb yourself in some goal. Be so busy you don’t have time to worry about love. Time passes quickly when--”

“Renji, just stop. I know you’re trying to help, but I’m… I’m sick and no amount of made-up wishful thinking is going to make me better.”

Renji’s face rapidly cycled through a number of emotions, like he kept coming up with things to say and then biting his tongue instead. “It’s not fucking made up, okay? People have lived with it for years, you know. Decades. Fuck, Rukia do you know selfish this is?”

“‘Selfish’?” Rukia echoed incredulously. The alcohol was starting to hit, and it made her feel unmoored, a raft floating in a sea of her own grief and anger. What did he know anyway? He was married to his job and his duty. The truest companion, the most generous soul, so free with his heart to everyone he called friend, but he didn’t know jack shit about being in love. Renji was the most transparent person in Soul Society. If he had ever fallen in love, it would have been public knowledge. Maybe his heart didn’t even work that way. What the Hell did he know?

“Yeah,” Renji spat back. “Selfish and cruel. How can you love someone-- even if they don’t love you back-- and-- and-- let yourself die from it? What kind of a monster would do that? You can hold on, Rukia. You’re so strong, I know you can. Just… just listen to me, for once. I can help you.”

Rukia felt her eyes burning, so she grabbed the bottle and took a long drink from it until her whole face burned. “Fuck. Off,” she replied, slamming it down on the table.

“I won’t,” Renji growled. “Ichigo cares a lot for you and it would kill him, Rukia, you hear me? You can’t do this to him, or-- or the rest of us, either.”

Rukia stared at Renji uncomprehendingly. The room was starting to swim. “What the fuck does any of this have to do with Ichigo?” She suddenly felt very tired, so she folded her arms and put her head down on them. “You fucking dumbass.”

[kuromichad]

different subject that’s heavy on my mind rn but since i’m already being harsh let’s get into it. i wish it wasn’t automatically presumed to be some kind of truscum attitude when someone tries to express that different parts of The Trans Community have like, different needs and different risk levels and different experiences and that we have the ability to talk over each other, harm each other, etc... like when i put it that way people generally are like ‘of course that’s true!’ but is it ever really understood in practice? a number of people (not a large enough number, but still) are able to loosely understand ‘you can be trans and transphobic’ when it’s applied to the matter of transmisogyny but when a trans person tries to express distrust of or frustration with afab nb people due to how common it is that that category of person will, despite being trans/nb, espouse bioessentialist, anti-medical-transition, radfem-adjacent if not outright cryptoterf rhetoric, suddenly ‘trans people can be transphobic’ gets applied to... the person with a complaint about transphobia. 

because he’s clearly an evil truscum man! regardless of if the person making the complaint is a trans man or trans woman, oops, lol. he’s a bad person who is attacking and invalidating and totally hatecriming the heckin’ valid, equally at-risk transgender identity of “an afab woman who isn’t a woman except when she pointedly categorizes themself as a woman because being afab makes them a woman who is ‘politically aligned’ with women but she’s not an icky unwoke cis woman because they don’t like being forced into womanhood although Really When You Think About It 🤔 all women are dysphoric because obviously the pathologized medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria in transgender people is something that equally applies to cis women just default existing under patriarchy 🤔, and no, equating these things totally does not imply anything reductive about or add a bizarre moral dimension to the idea of being transgender, whaaaaat, this woman who isn’t a woman doesn’t think there’s anything immoral or cowardly or misogynist or delusional about being transgender, they would never say that because THEY’RE transgender, except when she feels it’s important (constantly) to make clear that she’s Still A Woman Deep Down Inherently Despite Not Identifying As One, and none of this ever has any effect on how they treat the concept, socially and politically, of people who actually wholly identify with (and possibly medically transition to) a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth, be it ‘the opposite gender’ or abstaining from binary gender altogether or ‘politically aligning’ with the ‘opposite’ gender from their asab. never ever!”

and like maybe that sounds like a completely absurd and hateful strawman to you! but in that case you’re either like, lucky, or optimistic, or ignorant. i’m literally not looking at random nb people and declaring that in My Truscum Opinion they’re ‘really a woman’ just because they’re not medically transitioning or meeting some arbitrary standard of mine. i am looking at self-identified afab nb people, who most often use she/they because, y’know, words mean things, especially pronouns, so people who are willingly ‘aligned with womanhood’ typically intentionally use she/her (sorry that i guess that’s another truscum take now!!! that pronouns mean things!!! the bigender transmasc who deliberately uses exclusively he/him wants it to invoke a perception he’s comfortable with!), who actively say the things listed above (in a non-sarcastic manner). 

like, the line between a person who says “i don’t claim to really not be my asab because i know no one would ever perceive me as anything else” because theyve internalized a defeatist attitude due to societal transphobia, and a person who says that because they... genuinely believe it’s impossible/ridiculous/an imposition to truly be transgender (in the traditional trans sense, beyond a vague nb disidentification with gender) and are actively contributing to the former person’s self loathing... is hard to define from a distance! i think plenty of people who are, in a sense, ‘tentative’ or like ‘playing close to home’ so to speak in their identity are ‘genuinely trans’ (whatever that may mean) and just going through a process. they might arrive at a different identity or might just eventually stop saying/believing defeatist stuff, who knows. but there are enough people saying it for the latter reason, or at least not caring if they sound that way, that it’s like, dangerous. it is actively incredibly harmful to other trans people. and it’s fucking ridiculous that it’s so difficult to criticize because you’ll always get the defense of “umm but i’m literally trans” and/or “well i’m just talking about ME, this doesn’t apply to other trans people” when it’s an attitude that very clearly seeps into their politics and the way they discuss gender.

because it’s just incredibly common for afab nb people (most typically those that go by she/they! since i’m aware that uh, i am also afab nb, but we clearly are extremely different, so that’s the best categorization i’ve got) to discuss gender in moralized terms, with the excuse of patriarchy/misogyny existing, which of course adds another difficult dimension to trying to criticize this because it gets the response of “don’t act like misandry is real” (it’s not, but being a dick still is) and “boohoo, let women complain about their oppressors” (this goes beyond ‘complaining’). a deliberate revocation of empathy/sympathy/compassion from men and projection of inherently malicious/brutish/cruel intent onto men (not solely in the justified generalizations ‘men suck/are dangerous’, but in specific interactions too) underpin a whole fucking lot of popular posts/discussions online, whether they’re political or casual/social, and it absolutely influences how people conceptualize and feel about transness. 

because ‘maleness is evil’ is still shitty politics even when you’ve slightly reframed it from the terf ‘trans women are evil because they’re Really Men and can never escape being horrific soulless brutes just as women can never escape being fragile morally superior flowers’ to the tumblr shethey “trans women who are out to me/unclockable are tolerable i guess because they’re women and women are good; anyone i personally presume to be a cis man, though, is still automatically evil, and saying trans men are Just As Bad is progressive of me, and it’s totally unrelated and apolitical that i think we should expand the concept of afab lesbianism so broadly that you can now be basically indistinguishable from trans men on literally every single level except for a declaration of ‘but i would never claim to be a man because i’m secure in the Innate Womanhood of the body i was born into, even as i medically alter that body because it causes me great gendered discomfort.’ none of this at all indicates that i feel there’s an immense moral/political gap between being an afab nb lesbian vs a straight trans man! it says nothing at all about my concept of ‘maleness’ and there’s no way this rhetoric bleeds into my perception of trans women and no way loudly talking about all this could keep trans people around me self-loathing and closeted, because i’m Literally Trans and Not A Terf!”

again, if that sounds like a hateful strawman, sorry but it’s not. i guess i’m supposed to be like ‘all of the many people ive seen saying these shitty things is an evil outlier who Doesn’t Count, and it’s not fair to the broad identity of afab shethey to not believe that every person who doesn’t outright say terfy enough things is a perfectly earnest valid accepting trans person who’s beyond criticism’ but like. this cannot be about broad validation. this can’t be about discarding all the bad apples as not really part of the group. we can’t be walking on eggshells to coddle what are essentially, in the end, Cis Feelings, because in the best cases this kind of rhetoric comes from naive people who are early and uncertain in their gender journey or whatever and are in the process of unraveling internalized transphobia, and in the easily observable worst cases these people are very literally redefining shit so that ‘actually all afab women are trans, spiritually, all afabs have dysphoria, we are all Equally oppressed by Males uh i mean cis men <3’ because, let’s be honest, they know that the moment they call themselves trans they get to say whatever they want about gender no matter how harmful it is to the rest of us. and those ideas spread like wildfire through the afab shethey “woman that’s not a woman” community that frankly greatly outnumbers other types of trans people online, because many of those people just do not have the experiences that lead you to really understand this shit and have to push back against concepts of gender that actively harm you as a trans person.

like that’s all i want to be able to say, is Things Are Different For Different Groups. and a willful ignorance of these differences leads to bad rhetoric controlling the overall discourse which gets people hurt. and even when concepts arise from it that seem positive and helpful and inclusive, in practice or in origin those ideas can still be upholding shit that gets other people hurt. like, i don’t doubt that many people are very straightforwardly happy and comfortable with an identity like ‘afab nb lesbian on testosterone’ and it would be ridiculous and hypocritical for me, ‘afab nb who wants to pass as a guy so he can comfortably wear skirts again,’ to act like that’s something that can’t or shouldn’t exist. it’s not about the identity itself, it’s about the politics that are popular within its community, and how the use of identities as moral labels with like, fucking pokemon type interactions for oppression effectiveness which directly informs the moral correctness of your every opinion and your very existence, is a shitty practice that gets people hurt and leads us to revoke empathy from each other.

like. sorry this is all over the place and long and probably still sounds evil because i haven’t thought through and disclaimered every single statement. but i’m like exhausted from living with this self-conscious guilt that maybe i’ve turned into a horrible evil truscum misogynist etc etc due to feeling upset by this seemingly inescapable approach to gender in lgbt/online circles that like, actively harms me, because when i vent with my friends all the stuff i’ve tried to explain here gets condensed down to referencing ‘she/theys’ as a category and that feels mean and generalizing and i genuinely dislike generalizations but the dread i feel about that category gets proven right way too often. it’s just like. this is not truscum this is not misgendering this is not misogyny. this is not about me decreeing that all transmascs have to be manly enough or dysphoric enough and all nbs have to be neatly agender and androgynous or something, i’m especially not saying that nb gender isn’t real lmao or even that it’s automatically wrong to partially identify with your asab; this is not me saying you can only medically transition for specific traditional reasons or that you don’t get a say on anything if you aren’t medically transitioning for whatever reason, now or ever. i just. want to be allowed to be frank about how... when there’s different experiences in a community we should like. acknowledge those differences and be willing to say that sometimes people don’t know what they’re talking about or that what they’re saying is harmful. without the primary concern being whether people will feel invalidated by being told so. because these are like, real issues, that are more important than politely including everyone, because that method is just getting vulnerable people drowned out constantly.

[thebluelemontree]

Is it wrong to say that Sansa uses an out of sight out of mind coping mechanism? I noticed it because it's what I do a lot. I know some ppl say she rewrites traumatic memories to make the memories bearable but it doesn't make sense. If that was how she coped, wouldn't she have been telling herself lies about Joffrey still in acok? Or found a way to erase/rewrite Marillion's attempt to rape her?

Yes and no. She does that except all the times she doesn’t. ;) I think that characterization is extremely reductionist (and ignores character complexity and  growth) when it’s applied that broadly to every situation Sansa has been in. You have to take these things instance by instance because they aren’t all the same. Sometimes that labeling doesn’t fit at all. In many cases, it feels more like the fandom pathologizing the act of romanticizing or trying to push aside or reframe something unpleasant or even traumatic when that’s just something most human beings do now and then. Some do it more than others, but its all within the realm of typical coping behavior and being older or more educated or more “logical” doesn’t make one immune to it. So I hope you don’t let those interpretations make you feel abnormal or more fallible for identifying with Sansa in that way. Romanticizing doesn’t even have to be about coping at all, but simply expressing desire through daydreams. People imagine being in idealized scenarios with crushes all the time.  

You also hit the nail on the head. Sansa just doesn’t go around making up false narratives about every objectively awful thing that happens to her. In fact, her actual responses to those moments can be a useful basis for comparison when we’re analyzing the unkiss, for example. Misunderstanding the unkiss is usually where a lot of these assumptions stem from. That’s a whole other can of worms in itself. The unkiss is just too long of a discussion to put here, so I just recommend this post as to the reasons why it isn’t about trauma and take a browse through my unkiss tag. It does bear repeating that Sansa factually remembers every scary thing that happened during the Blackwater and why it happened, indicating she has processed it honestly and critically, before any incarnation of the unkiss happens. The unkiss is a mismemory added on to the facts, which began as her being the actor that kissed him first. It’s not a lie to deny the facts or to excuse his behavior. It’s regrettable to her that Sandor was not able to be the person she could rely on to get her out of KL at that time. Nonetheless, this repressed desire is just so strong in her that it manifested in a kiss so real she could remember how it felt after the reality of his leaving KL for good sank in. 

Early AGOT Sansa tended to want to move past unpleasantness rather quickly. Just sweep those red flags under the rug so everything can go back to blissful harmony. Sansa is naturally averse to conflict and just wants her present with the royal family to be smooth sailing into a bright future. Ned had a very similar tendency when it came to concerns over Robert’s true character. He saw things that disturbed him, but he hoped and clung to his idea of Robert anyway. For Sansa, this resulted in some misplaced blame and rewriting events so she could deal with the aftermath. This is mostly seen in her processing the Mycah incident after Lady’s death and how her perception of all the characters involved shifted in varying ways. This is after she knew perfectly well what really happened, because Ned says Sansa had already told him the truth of what Joffrey did while Arya was still missing. However, it would also be unfair to completely chalk this up to Sansa’s idiosyncrasies. We have to put her flip-flopping in the context of the situation as well. She’s also experienced a gutting loss with Lady’s death and the fact that the first blow to her innocence was her father volunteering to put Lady down. She doesn’t have Catelyn to go to with her confusion and hurt, and Ned has largely been silent. She’s also still engaged to Joffrey through all this, this is still a patriarchy, there are political ramifications to speaking against a crown prince, and she doesn’t know how to deal with seeing such cruelty and vindictiveness in her future husband. Especially when he responded to her tender concern and wanting to help him with venom and hate. 

I mean, jeez, she’s 11. I don’t expect an 11 year old to understand how to identify the signs of emotional manipulation or see how this situation can escalate into domestic violence. Just because Sansa can’t articulate what is happening within her relationship with Joffrey, doesn’t mean she has blocked out any notion that Joffrey can turn his anger on her. Part of the reason she misplaces blame on Arya (and rewrites what happened) is because Joffrey turns scornful of Sansa for being a witness to his emasculating shame. He punishes her with the cold shoulder because she didn’t immediately take his side and pretended not to see instead. He regains power through making Sansa feel small and fearful of his moods. 

“He had not spoken a word to her since the awful thing had happened, and she had not dared to speak to him.” -- Sansa II, AGOT.

Sansa looked at him and trembled, afraid that he might ignore her or, worse, turn hateful again and send her weeping from the table. -- Sansa II, AGOT.

This is coming from someone who is supposed to love her and someone she will spend the rest of her life with. To fix things, she must be unequivocally on Joffrey’s side going forward or suffer the consequences, which we can see happening as her story completely flips over breakfast sometime later. This is not saying Sansa is fully exonerated from not supporting her sister when she needed her, but that it’s understandable how she arrived at this point. Even when things start to get really bad after Ned’s arrest, Sansa still holds out some hope that she can appeal to Joffrey’s (and Cersei’s) love for her to get him to be merciful. Is it really her fault she believed a part of Joffrey really loved her (and thus was reachable by her pleas) if he also heavily love bombed her and treated her like she was the most special girl in the world? Love bombing is a classic feature of the seduction phase leading up to abuse.  

So we can see Sansa does ignore truths and rewrite events sometimes and her personality is a factor; however, the context surrounding it matters a lot. Post Ned’s execution, Sansa does a full 180 regarding Joffrey and Cersei.

Sansa stared at him, seeing him for the first time. He was wearing a padded crimson doublet patterned with lions and a cloth-of-gold cape with a high collar that framed his face. She wondered how she could ever have thought him handsome. His lips were as soft and red as the worms you found after a rain, and his eyes were vain and cruel. "I hate you," she whispered. -- Sansa VI, AGOT.

Once she had loved Prince Joffrey with all her heart, and admired and trusted his mother, the queen. They had repaid that love and trust with her father's head. Sansa would never make that mistake again. -- Sansa I, ACOK. 

"A monster," she whispered, so tremulously she could scarcely hear her own voice. "Joffrey is a monster. He lied about the butcher's boy and made Father kill my wolf. When I displease him, he has the Kingsguard beat me. He's evil and cruel, my lady, it's so. And the queen as well." -- Sansa I, ASOS. 

There’s also her conscious efforts to push away thoughts of her dead family and Jeyne Poole, but she states why she does that. It’s traumatic, the tears start flowing uncontrollably, and she is desperately trying to avoid falling into another suicidal depression. Her survival in KL depends on her holding it together and appearing loyal and obedient to Joffrey. Mourning her loved ones would imply to Joffrey she is plotting treason. Besides, she knows that even if she did ask Cersei or LF about Jeyne, she has no reason to believe they’d do anything but lie to her face in a patronizing way. There’s no point being plagued with wondering what the truth might be when she can’t do anything about it. Still, she prayed for Jeyne wherever she might be. She genuinely thought Arya had made it to WF on the ship and was safe at least until she got word of her brothers’ deaths and her home being sacked by the Iron Born, though there was initially a touch of projection and fantasizing about Arya being free while she remains captured. As of Feast, she believes she is the last Stark left alive and she has no one but Littlefinger to help her. So while she is suppressing her grief, it’s done with good reason, and it’s not being replaced with any false narratives to cope. 

We also cannot ignore that her relationship to Sandor Clegane has instilled in her an appreciation for the un-sugarcoated truth now that she has experienced betrayal and injustice first hand. In his own way, he’s encouraged her to listen to her own inner bullshit detector. The rose-tinted glasses have become a lot more clear compared to where she started. This is a newly learned skill though, and her self-confidence has been wrecked by internalized verbal abuse. She’s also been left on her own to figure out people’s intentions by herself, which runs parallel to her mounting desperation to get out of KL as Joffrey’s violence escalates. Developing a touch more of a jaded, skeptical side does sometimes clash with her enduring idealism and faith in other people (like with the Tyrells). This struggle is not a bad thing. The goal isn’t to become as cynical as the Hound, but to arrive at an earned optimism that has been tempered by wisdom and practical experience.

Her situation with Littlefinger is much more challenging than anything she faced in KL. He moves her where he wants her to go with complex web of lies, manipulation, grooming, isolation, coercion, dependence, guilt and shame. Her safety and desire to go home are tightly bound to being complicit in his lies and criminal activities. She feels indebted to him for getting her out of KL, even though his methods push her past her boundaries and force her to compromise her moral integrity. The thing is, there are things Sansa does know about LF, but she doesn’t seem to be ready to try and put the puzzle pieces together. She’s not daring to ask probing questions about Lysa’s reference to the “tears” and Jon Arryn or about the possible dangers of Maester Colemon prescribing sweetsleep for Robert’s convulsions. While the subject of Jeyne’s fate is still one she doesn’t want to revisit, somewhere in her mind she does know LF took custody of her friend. If it feels like this is somewhat of a regression back to her early AGOT self, there’s probably some truth to that; however, it’s perfectly okay for positive character arcs to be an imperfect progress. There can be relapses, regressions, setbacks, missteps, and misguided actions. All that growth isn’t lost. Everything she knows is just stored in the back of her mind, not forgotten completely. The general trend line moves her toward successfully confronting Littlefinger with the truth when GRRM is ready to pull the trigger. She’s definitely aware of Littlefinger lying to her more than she lets on and she knows his help is not out of the kindness of his heart, but motivated by what he wants her to be to him. But it’s not like she has the option to go anywhere else, does she? She’s a wanted criminal with a bounty on her head and has no other friend or ally in the Vale she can trust with the truth of her identity. Confronting LF without any means of neutralizing his power over her isn’t the smartest thing to do when he’s shown her he can literally get away with multiple murders. Again, it’s not just her personality that makes her hesitant to pull back the veil and face the horrible truth head on. The outside forces pressuring her perceptions and behavior cannot be discounted either.    

[hamiltonlindley]

Building a Resilient Team

Resilience is a shield protecting us from perpetual change, persistent stress, and constant pressures—it leverages our most challenging situations towards our growth. The story of the donkey and the farmer illustrates the power of resilience.

One afternoon, a farmer’s donkey fell into a pit. The creature bellowed for hours as the farmer analyzed how to get his donkey out of the well. He decided the animal was so old that he wasn’t worth retrieving. And the pit was dangerous. So he decided to cover them both up with dirt. He would bury the donkey alive.

The farmer and his friends grabbed shovels and began to throw dirt on the donkey. When the donkey realized the farmer was burying him, he roared horribly. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the donkey calmed down. That donkey must have surrendered to his fate. They kept shoveling.

After loads of dirt down on the donkey, the farmer looked down in the well, expecting to see a layer of soil where his old donkey used to be. But instead, he saw his donkey on top of the fresh dirt. With each shovel of earth, the donkey shook it off and took a step up. Eventually, with enough dirt, the donkey stepped over the edge of the well and trotted off to safety.

Life shovels dirt on us. We can either surrender and get buried alive or shake it off and step up. Each of our struggles is an opportunity. That obstacle may be the way out of your pit of despair. When life shovels dirt on you, or something stinkier, shake it off and take a step up. You can get out of the deepest wells by not giving up.

What does a resilient team look like?

Researchers at Harvard Business School have identified four main elements of resilient teams.

Humility: Can your team ask for and accept help from other team members? Resilient teams admit when a problem is unmanageable and ask for help. They do not conceal their failures but lean into the team for finding solutions.

Resourcefulness: When confronted with difficulties, does your team develop practical and creative answers? Resilient teams bounce from setbacks. They remain focused on outcomes no matter the external conditions.

Candor: Does your team honestly share feedback? Resilient groups vocalize truth to teammates, collectively identifying and solving challenges they face together.

Empathy: Does your team authentically care for teammates in both failure and success? Resilience is a devotion to elevating the team instead of seeking personal recognition. Talk with your employees frequently and actively listen. Help them recognize triggers of stress that are affecting their work and wellbeing. Social support is vital for managing stress among groups. Empathy creates a loyal and committed team. It also teaches us to be present, improves happiness, and cultivates collaboration.

How do I build a resilient team?

Create bonding activities. Your coworkers need to know about each other’s lives outside of work. Without a bond, they will fail to rally around each other in a time of difficulty. When your team lacks a dose of social interaction from the workplace, the leader must keep them feeling that they are a vital part of something greater than themselves. In team meetings, start them off with both a professional and personal update.

Encourage your team to give positive feedback daily, play remote games, or enjoy virtual coffee breaks together. Make sure that they are taking advantage of video calls and chat applications to foster interactions. Share a funny meme daily. Ask a group question of the day to foster discussion about something other than work. People need to know they are not alone.

Encourage collaboration. A resilient team is a supportive network. Reassure your employees that they can rely on each other When an employee is faced with a difficult situation, ask her to think who on the team could help. That will build resilience in both the person seeking help and the worker providing it.

Communicate with certainty. When your team lacks information, they will begin to let anxiety take over. In uncertain times, we can become more anxious and almost obsessed with the unknown. No matter how bad the news is, don’t hide information from your team. People would rather know reality instead of being kept in the dark.

Consistently make your team members feel valued and appreciated. Promote the appreciation of the gifts that each team member brings to your group. Make sure that you compliment each individual for their specific accomplishments. Create a place that celebrates the whole person by paying attention to your workers. Did someone mention a new hobby? Ask them about it. Buy supplies for them. Remind them that you deeply value their contributions.

Reframe your employees’ insecurities  

Give a positive spin to the circumstances that frustrate your workers. Help them look at change as an opportunity instead of something to fear. In the book How Great Leaders Think: The Art of Reframing, the author advocates that we should only focus on what we can control. Encourage your employee to spend her energy on concerns within her influence while letting go of things outside of her control.  

To reframe our way of seeing a situation, we should ask ourselves whether there is a genuine loss or just guessing an adverse consequence? We cannot get our minds stuck on how things ought to be. Ask ourselves what we can improve for next time. What was within our control and what was not?

Perfectionism is the enemy. Trying to be perfect will erode the resilience of your team. For years, I strived for perfection to hide my shortcomings. I believed that I needed to project an ideal image to dodge criticism. But perfection is unattainable. As my desire for perfection grew, I risked explosion or collapse. It requires a tremendous amount of energy, with no energy left over for a crisis. Your team will be awash in a sea of fear if you expect perfection from them.

A perfectionist is prone to ask himself questions that are reactive and unproductive, for example, “who is at fault for us not outperforming our competition?” To avoid perfectionism as a leader, ask yourself, “What am I missing? What actions might I take?”

The opposite of a resilient team is a fearful team

Fear causes more errors. Rather than use common sense, workers attempt to read their boss’ mind. So the employees drop the ball over and over. Constant criticism has the same effect.

Resilient teams are not fearful. If your team is continuously afraid, it is not resilient. Do you fear making a mistake? A team that isn’t resilient is consistently afraid of reprimands, demotions, or firings. That isn’t an environment that fosters innovation. Fear is an awful motivator. It drives us to make irrational decisions. When we are motivated by fear, we react without thinking things through, lash out in anger, and isolate ourselves. A workplace awash in fear won’t last long. Fear focuses on the short term instead of the long term.

Resilience requires a psychologically safe workplace

To be resilient, we must understand what we cannot control. We need to remain calm to make responsible choices for things we can control. We must stay positive.

To build resilience in the workplace, teams need a psychologically safe atmosphere where the following conditions are met:

Workers trust that supervisors won’t penalize them for individual mistakes – don’t create a tattletale culture.

Employees are held accountable for their good and bad actions.

Teams uplift each individual’s strengths rather than concentrating on their weaknesses.

Workers feel respected so that they raise their hand when something could be improved or is not right.

People are accountable for the organization’s prosperity and share praise.

Teams uplift each individual’s strengths rather than concentrating on their weaknesses.

These qualities are the way a resilient workplace keeps focused on the company’s vision. Resilient teams have the mental toughness to respond to crises. With a resilient group, a catastrophe goes from a volcano to a speed bump.

Conclusion

Building resilience where fear has deep roots takes skilled effort and leadership. Organizational leaders must direct change without rigid solutions. We must master collaborative leadership to sustain our organizations in an increasingly complex, ambiguous, and volatile world.

[pocket-poly]

Emotional libertarianism, as defined by More Than Two, is “a belief that every individual is entirely responsible for his or her own emotional responses and that person’s behaviour is never the “cause” of another person’s emotion.” This concept is talked a lot about in polyamory, particularly in conversations around personal autonomy and boundaries. Most frequently, I’ve seen it come up a lot in discussions where couples are opening up a previously monogamous relationship, and one person is struggling with negative feelings around their partner dating and loving other people.

If you do something that leads to someone else feeling hurt, the common expectation is to apologise for what you have done and, where appropriate, to make reparations for your actions that led to that hurt. However, when taken to an extreme, people can twist this by blaming all their negative feelings on someone else’s actions, essentially making them responsible for their emotional state to an unreasonable extent. In a past relationship of mine, my ex had some extreme attachment issues, and would constantly guilt-trip me for spending any time without him due to his fear of abandonment. This emotionally abusive and exhausting relationship deteriorated to the point where I would feel guilty for spending time on my hobbies or even with my own family, because I knew that doing so would directly lead to him throwing a tantrum that I didn’t care about him.

Against this backdrop, emotional libertarianism can feel quite freeing. The concept does have some merits: it champions individual autonomy, motivates people to work through their own trauma independently, and discourages people from becoming overly reliant on their partners for emotional reassurance. However, as with anything, this can be toxic when taken to an extreme and used as a tool for abuse. Some people use emotional libertarianism as a way to dodge responsibility or accountability for their actions, to punish their partners for feeling entirely reasonable and human feelings as a result of toxic abuse, and to manipulate their partners into suppressing their negative emotions so as to keep their partner happy and not appear “controlling”.

With all this in mind, where exactly is the line? How do we honour our personal autonomy, while also being compassionate and caring to our partners?

ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, HOWEVER UNINTENTIONAL

With autonomy comes responsibility, but not in the ways you may think. While we are autonomous individuals who can do whatever we want, I think we also have to accept that our actions have consequences, and have the potential to directly influence how other people feel, even if the results were not what you intended. We do not live in a vacuum, and sometimes the things we do have unforeseen repercussions. An example would be if you went out on a date with someone else, and came home to find your partner in tears from a jealousy attack while you were away. While we cannot take responsibility for other people’s feelings because we ultimately cannot control how other people choose to feel, we are responsible for our actions and how they may affect others. Being in a relationship with someone suggests that you care about them to some extent, and one would hope that people who love each other would try their very best not to hurt each other, are committed to not exacerbating each other’s pain and suffering when it is expressed, and endeavour to create spaces where their partners feel safe and loved. This means we have to own up to mistakes when we have made them, instead of trying to shift blame onto others. In cases where the hurt was unintentional, acknowledging the impact of your actions and holding space for your partner to process their feelings can go a long way, and practising empathy and compassion for your partner is key.

TALK ABOUT YOUR NEEDS FOR CARE AND SUPPORT EARLY ON

Different people have different needs when it comes to giving and receiving care from their partners. One thing that my anchor partner does very well is that he is able to share his problems with me, without necessarily making them my problem as well. He informs me of his struggles so that I am kept in the loop of what is going on in his life, but beyond that, I am not expected or obligated to talk through his feelings, because most of the time, that is not what he needs or wants from me. I, on the other hand, prefer to talk about my problems with my loved ones and solve them through collaborative discussion; however, I recognise that not everyone has the time or energy for this, so I try to spread it out amongst people who have the capacity to do so and genuine willingness to help, such family, friends, and occasionally helpful strangers in polyamory discussion groups. I ask for what I need from people, but I never feel entitled to it, and I am grateful for the people in my life who do share their time and energy with me when I am struggling.

Some people have the emotional capacity to help others with processing their feelings about a situation and enjoy doing so, while others do not for a wide variety of reasons. Some people may view someone else sharing their problems with them as a nuisance and a burden, while others view it as a privilege and a gift that their partners can be so vulnerable and trusting with them to ask for their help and advice. When dealing with negative emotions, some people prefer to receive emotional reassurance from their partners, while others prefer direct advice and practical solutions. Some prefer to externalise and share their issues with other people, while others prefer to internalise and go away to handle their feelings on their own. There is no right or wrong answer as to how much care should be given or received, and it is merely an issue of compatibility between people. It’s important to talk about what you are able to give to a relationship and what you would like to receive, in order to avoid mismatched expectations and feelings of entitlement.

When setting boundaries and making relationship agreements with our partners, those boundaries and agreements have to be honoured in order for trust to build and flourish. If you cannot stick to certain agreements for whatever reason, then talk about renegotiating them so you can find a solution that works for all parties. If there isn’t a solution that works for all parties, then that will just lead to unhappiness, resentment, or a breakup later down the line. So if you fail to communicate, deliberately disrespect your partner’s boundaries in the name of personal autonomy, and proceed to tell your partner their feelings are not your problem, don’t be surprised if your partner doesn’t stick around, and uses their personal autonomy to end their relationship with you.

CONTEXTUALISE YOUR PARTNER'S FEELINGS AND REACTIONS

Circling back to empathy and compassion, viewing your partner’s reactions to situations within the context of trauma they have experienced may give you some insight into why they are struggling in the way that they are. It is this knowledge that can sometimes help reframe someone’s reactions that may, at first glance, seem completely irrational. For example, someone who has a history with neglectful parents or cheating partners may struggle with jealousy attacks more often than people who do not. People with certain mental illnesses or disorders, like anxiety or BPD, may also respond differently to situations; for example, I myself am autistic, and as a child would get extremely upset by small changes to my routine in ways that neurotypical people would not.

How much leniency you decide to exercise in light of your partner’s trauma or personal issues, and how much you wish to change your behaviour or beliefs to accommodate those things out of consideration, is completely up to you. This is a fine balance to strike, with no one-size-fits-all answer. However, while it is important to be mindful of personal differences between yourself and your loved ones, it is also important not to excuse their behaviour to an unreasonable extent. For example, if your partner proceeds to verbally harass you for making a genuine mistake, or use you as their personal therapist or an emotional crutch, at some point that would be unreasonable, exhausting, and even abusive. Respect your partner’s boundaries, but do not disrespect your own in the process.

ABOVE ALL, BE KIND

Ethics is sticky, and there will almost always be an exception to every rule. At the end of the day, while someone’s feelings may not be your obligation or responsibility to manage, it is kind to help them with processing their feelings if you have the capacity and willingness to do so. It’s also important to not get too caught up in your pride and let it get in the way of you comforting or apologising to someone, or to ignore your partner’s feelings in favour of logically justifying your actions. If I accidentally bump into a stranger on the street and they fall over, I say “sorry”, not because I wanted to hurt them, but because of the impact of my actions and the hurt that resulted from it. It’s easy to think, “I don’t have to apologise, because this situation wasn’t my fault,” but are you really going to tell someone that they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, or that their pain is entirely their problem? Probably not.

I enjoy communicating compassionately with my partners, developing mutual understanding, respect, and consideration, and getting as much out of my relationships as the effort I put into them. Being kind and loving takes humility and vulnerability, but it is exactly those things that lead to supportive and fulfilling relationships.

*This blog post was originally published on my Wordpress blog, Poly Philia.*

[samwisethewitch]

A Must-Read Book for Ex-Mormons: Recovering Agency by Luna Lindsey (Review)

I do not use the phrase “must-read” lightly. There are very few books that I think every single person — or at least every single member of a given group — can benefit from. After all, we’re all different people with different intellectual, emotional, and spiritual needs.

But I genuinely believe that every person who has ever left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints should read Recovering Agency: Lifting the Veil of Mormon Mind Control by Luna Lindsey.

When I was looking for books to help me process my trauma related to growing up Mormon, I had two criteria. First, I didn’t want to just read someone else’s exit story — I wanted a book that would help me understand my trauma and how to heal from it. Second, I didn’t want to read any book that was pushing an agenda — I didn’t want to be converted to another denomination of Christianity, or to atheism. Recovering Agency meets both of these criteria and then some.

Lindsey is very clear that her goal with this book is not to convince people that the Church is evil, or even that its issues can’t be fixed. She repeatedly points out that Mormonism is right for some people. In the book’s Foreword she says, “In these pages, I describe in detail the negative power organizations have to control the hearts of men. But I also hope for that which is harder to see… that religious faith can inspire the best in people, in spite of any institution’s attempts to control.”

But at the same time, she doesn’t tiptoe around the truth or avoid making controversial statements. She’s very clear from page one that the single goal of this book is to explore how the Mormon Church uses — and has always used — cult mind control techniques on its members.

In the first chapter Lindsey says, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a high-demand group, a deceptive religion that utilizes psychological manipulation via doctrine and culture to restrict the thoughts, behaviors, and emotions of otherwise good and intelligent members. In a word — though it is admittedly a highly-charged, loaded word — Mormonism is a cult.”

The bulk of the book consists of Lindsey explaining individual control techniques, then examining how they are used in the Church. She does this by comparing research from well-respected cult experts (including Steven Hassan, Margaret Singer, and Robert B. Cialdini) with quotes from Mormon scriptures, handbooks, and talks. She also weaves in firsthand accounts from current and former Mormons.

This book is incredibly well-researched, and Lindsey inserts very little of her own opinion. All she does is connect the dots between what we know about how cults operate and what the Church is actually doing. For someone who grew up in the echo chamber of Mormonism, where everything ultimately circled back on itself and outside sources were rarely referenced, this is incredibly refreshing.

This book helped me to understand my experiences as a Mormon in a way that no other resource has.

I’ve read up on all the ways Mormon doctrine directly contradicts the Bible. I’ve studied the Church’s history, from Joseph Smith’s criminal record and child brides to the Mountain Meadows Massacre to the modern Church’s use of tithe money for business ventures. I’ve read other people’s exit stories and been reminded that experiences like mine are not uncommon. And yet, I never found a sense of closure, even though I knew without a shred of doubt that the Church was false and that my life was better off without it.

This book helped me change my approach. Before, I’d been approaching my trauma as a negative experience with a corrupt religious institution — but that didn’t explain the extent of its impact on my life. Once I changed my approach and saw my trauma for what it was — years of cult membership and thought control which I needed to intentionally deprogram myself from — everything clicked, the pieces fell into place, and I was finally able to progress in my healing.

As Lindsey points out, “Knowing a little about mind control… helps inoculate against many types of unethical persuasion.”

And as the saying goes, “The first step is admitting you have a problem.”

Like I said, I really cannot recommend this book highly enough to my fellow ex-Mormons, especially those who still struggle to come to terms with their experiences in the Church.

I recommend keeping a journal handy while reading Recovering Agency. Every time you read a section that brings up a memory, causes a strong emotional response, or connects two dots, write it down. What did the passage bring up? How can you apply cult research to help you understand this memory/feeling/experience better?

It’s almost ridiculous how easily I was able to work through my experiences once I had the right vocabulary. I was able to deconstruct my fears and traumatic memories by identifying the thought control techniques that causes them. “Oh, that’s a double-bind,” “That was love bombing,” “This is a totalist reframing,” etc. Like trying to untangle a ball of yarn, once you find that one central string, the rest almost seems to unravel itself.

Rating: 5/5

[life-observed]

Read This When You Are Finding It Difficult To Love Yourself

Loving yourself, means coming back home to yourself.

In a world that sometimes convinces us we have to change, or edit ourselves, in order to be loved, it is so important to reintroduce ourselves to our own souls again. If you are struggling with fostering self love, try asking yourself who you truly are, deep down. Ask yourself what you like, and dislike. Ask yourself how you want to feel when you go out into the world. Ask yourself what your non negotiables are, what your standards are, what you never want to settle for again. Really think: Who are you when you’re alone with your mind? When you’re not trying to be everything for everyone? What genuinely makes you happy? What ignites you?

And while it can feel overwhelming to sit with yourself in that way, while it can feel so foreign, it’s a great first step towards showing up for yourself. When you love others in your life, you want to get to know them on the deepest level in order to be able to love them the way that they need to be loved. So when it comes to a relationship with yourself, you need to know yourself on that level too, in order to love yourself the way you need to be loved.

Forgive yourself for who you had to be in your past.

It is unbelievably easy to look back on the things you had to do in order to survive, or heal, or the mistakes you made, or the person you were in your past, and allow for all of that to make you feel like you aren’t good enough, or deserving of what you want. Our pasts can bring up feelings of shame, and that shame can often make you love yourself less, because you are seeing yourself through the lens of who you used to be.

If that is one of the reasons why you find it difficult to be kind to yourself, why you find it difficult to care for yourself, I want to remind you that life is really hard. And there is no perfect way to execute our existence. It is never as black and white as we think it is. There is no guideline on how to be a human being who is dealing with the grittiness of what it means to simply live, and love, and make mistakes. We have all been versions of ourselves that we wouldn’t necessarily clap for now. We have all been the person who hurts, or who makes the wrong choice, or who can’t show up. This doesn’t make you a bad person. This makes you human.

So a step towards loving yourself is forgiveness. Forgive yourself for what you had to do in order to kill your sadness. Forgive yourself for how you settled, or allowed yourself to be treated. Forgive yourself for the ways in which you didn’t fight for who you were becoming. Forgive yourself for the ways you tried to catch your footing. When you call it all by it’s name, when you truly face all that it was — not with the desire to change it, not with regret, but with tenderness for what has come and gone, for what cannot be reversed, forgiveness affords you this ability to reframe your past. It affords you the opportunity to stop seeing your present self through that lens, and you learn from it, rather than letting it hurt you or demean you or belittle you. You take the lessons, and you allow for them to inspire you into standing up for who you are and who you want to be. Acceptance is love.

Loving yourself means respecting yourself.

In order to love ourselves, the distance between who we are internally, and who we show the world, has to be nonexistent. There should be no gap between those two realities.

Try your best to be honest with yourself about who you are, and don’t ever edit yourself. Because when you stop yourself from speaking your truth, when you silence yourself in order to appease everyone around you, you bankrupt yourself. You become a shell of yourself, and that can make you feel really trapped and misunderstood, because you aren’t being true to yourself. You aren’t creating the art you want to create, you’re not loving how you want to love, you’re not showing up the way you want to show up, because you’re scared of being fully and openly who you are. There is a disconnect between your desires, and your actions.

Remind yourself that who you are on the inside is worthy. And who you are on the inside is a beautiful human being that the world would be lucky to know. You don’t have to edit yourself in order to be accepted or loved or cared for. You don’t have to change yourself. You just have to be unapologetically who you are. You have to do the things that make you happy, on a soul level, and you have to do them almost foolishly — don’t ask for permission to be who you are. Stand in your power.

That kind of freedom is life changing, because you’re respecting yourself. And when you earn your own respect, you stand firmly in who you are. You know that you aren’t being dishonest with yourself, or editing yourself down, you know that you’re showing up for yourself. You’re being kind to yourself. You’re being proud of who you are. As you are.

Trust the process, and invest in yourself.

You are a human being who is learning and growing each and every day. You do certain things really well, you have talents and beauty within you that is rare and that is yours and yours alone. And you have a lot of work to do, as well. A lot of things you have to heal, a lot of things you have to come to terms with and accept. Life isn’t ever going to be void of those things. That is why it is important to try your best to love where you are even if it isn’t where you want to be right now. It is important to show yourself some grace, to trust in yourself and in the process.

When you trust in the process, when you understand that this journey back home to yourself, that this journey towards being who you want to be, and loving yourself throughout it all, when you do all of that, you learn how to invest in yourself.

And investing in yourself looks like planting seeds within your life that you know are going to bloom, no matter how long it takes. It’s about setting yourself up, about doing the hard work. It’s about showing up for yourself.

So ask yourself — how can you show up for yourself right now? What can you do that you will look back on and feel proud of? Sometimes that looks like being healthy, even when you don’t want to. Sometimes that looks like limiting your social media use so you can get your visions and your ideas sorted on a foundational level. Sometimes that looks like doing the things that would be easy to just ignore, sometimes being able to show up for yourself in that way — to really motivate yourself to do the work, is how you show yourself love.

And this also means showing yourself love by healing, even when it hurts. By really digging into the soul of who you are and doing the deep work, the hard work; unhinging your ribcage and peering into all of the baggage and all of the wounds and slowly learning how to carry it, how to clean it out, how to confront it and let it go. Showing yourself kindness, especially when it isn’t easy, is the best way to show yourself love.

Pay attention.

Pay attention to the things that make you come home to yourself. The things that make you happy, the things that bring you to life. Ask yourself — what brings you joy? Who are you with when you’re the happiest? What are you doing when you feel the best? When was the last time you felt truly alive, truly free, truly open to the world, without judgement, or fear? When was the last time you felt clarity in your heart, like you were being empowered and inspired to love yourself? What ignited that kind of beauty in your life? Chase that. Fill your life with those things, and those people.

Make sure that you are paying attention to the goodness, that you are taking inventory of all of the things that make you feel deeply. But make sure that you are paying attention to the opposite, too. Who makes you question yourself? Who makes you feel like you are hard to love? What do you do in life that genuinely lowers your energy, that drains you or makes you feel like you aren’t good enough? What is stealing your joy, your ability to see yourself as someone who is deserving of the same love they give to others?

Cut yourself off from those things. Walk away from those things. Please, whatever you do — be honest with yourself about what hurts you, what makes you feel small, what isn’t serving you any longer, and have the courage to walk away. Not only does that feel empowering, but it will change your life, and create space for you to chase that which does set your soul on fire, that which does make you feel love for yourself and your life.

Remember —

you deserve the love you give to others.

Think about all of the ways you love others, the ways you forgive and celebrate them. Think about all of the energy you expend being kind to others, being a good friend, being the kind of human being they can depend on. Think about the ways you encourage the people in your life, the ways you forgive them for their mistakes, the ways you motivate them to embrace their flaws, the ways you show them just how much they can be loved not only when they are shining examples of who they want to be, but when they aren’t themselves or when they’re going through difficulty. Think about all of the ways you love others unconditionally, and unapologetically, the way love pours out of you for everyone around you, how tender and how patient and how forgiving and how kind you are to those you care about.

Now ask yourself, why don’t you do that for yourself?

We show up so deeply for those in our lives and we forget to show up for ourselves. We love others so unconditionally, and we forget to give ourselves that same love. We forgive others for being human, for making mistakes, and we rarely do the same for ourselves. We speak kindness into those we love, we celebrate them and encourage them and we only ever want for them to have the sunniest, most beautiful, kind of happiness in their lives, and yet, we don’t afford ourselves the same tenderness. We don’t celebrate and encourage ourselves.

We have the capacity to be our own safe havens, we have the capacity to be our own home, we have the ability to encourage and care and love, but somewhere along our journeys we convinced ourselves that we weren’t worthy of it. That we didn’t deserve it.

So this is your reminder — you are deserving of the love you give to everyone else around you. You are deserving of your forgiveness. You are deserving of your grace. Your kindness. Your tenderness. It’s time to take all of that belief and invest it into yourself. It’s time to see your own worthiness. It’s time.