#some experiences seem to be universal

[edorazzi]

Page 30 of my Miraculous Mentor AU comic A Matter of Trust! In which Bri decides to reach out to the two weirdest guys in her life (and I get to adapt my all-time favourite PV scene)! ❄️❤️

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[bogkeep]

when i was a teen, i was in love with my best friend. to this day i cannot tell you with any certainty whether or not i was in love romantically or platonically. i don't know and i don't care. it's very possible there is a difference, but i never found it. i've asked many people about it and everyone has their own definition of where that line goes, none that ever applied to my own experiences. there is no satisfying, universal and objective line. i think that's good, actually. the idea that there is some shining abstract concept that's specialer than all the other concepts that can only be achieved like nirvana by some people and not others is not a comfortable idea. this is not to say that everyone has the same feelings and experiences, absolutely not - but we categorize our experiences within the contexts we exist in. or maybe that's just word salad.

i know that - at the time, i knew i was deeply connected to this other person and kept thinking about her all the time and we talked about wanting to be close friends for our whole lives and wrote poetry together about our soulmateness and we made mutual friends feel like a third wheel. i knew i had no desire to kiss her or take her on dates, and she crushed on some boy at summer camp, but the connection between us was mutual and explicit. if the concept of a queerplatonic relationship had been available to us at the time, maybe we would've recognized it as such. i just knew that what i was feeling didn't match up at all with what i've been told 'being in love' was supposed to be like - especially because, at the time, Being In Love also included sexual attraction. we had just cracked open the 2010's and asexuality was a punchline and a joke.

i know that - during the time i was made to feel ashamed of my aroace identity and the narrative was that i'm actually just repressing my TRUE queer identity, i reframed my memories - i had obviously been in love with my friend Romantically. i was a Real Gay. i was Valid. I Was Sapphic Actually. you can't kick me out of the parade if i had pined for my best friend as a teen!!!!

i know that - once i reclaimed the pride in myself, i reframed the memories again: i had obviously been in love with my friend Platonically, because otherwise i would've been a traitor to the good name of aromanticism. if i knew what it was like to have a crush i would contradict myself. who am i to write about romantic love as if i know? what was i doing at the devil's sacrament?

maybe it is a mystery. maybe i don't know shit. it's hard, actually, to know anything at all when the way my strange brain filters emotions through my body reads so different to the user manual. how can anyone stand to pine for another when it's all anxiety, all day? "butterflies"???? really????? how am i supposed to know anything for sure when my brain's favourite hobby is to pick thoughts apart and run them through the distortion machine on repeat, on repeat, on repeat? i don't know if i've ever loved anyone at all, now that i think about it. maybe i'm an empty shell of a human and everything i do is an act of puppetry and wishful thinking.

i just gotta trust that the love is there, in some form or another. even when i can't reach for it and confirm its existence - let alone deduce a detailed taxonomy. what do you even need that for.

[albatris]

Nat's experiences may be accurate to my own experiences of schizotypal personality disorder but what if I get it Wrong and everyone hates me and they say "this author clearly did no research into schizotypal personality disorder" like I'm some kind of idiot or buffoon or fool

[mumblesplash]

the fact that doctors can just Recommend Weight Loss with no instructions beyond ‘eat healthier/less’ is actually insane to me, i lost weight on purpose ONCE and it took me like 6 years to recover a semi-normal relationship with food and hunger

[coockie8]

i once had an anti tell me to stop sexualizing their trauma on a story i wrote that was a word for word retelling of my own actual trauma but with names changed and its been 2 years and i still cant stop thinking about that

Ah, yeah... Unfortunately a non-insignificant number of antishippers seem to genuinely believe they own the concept of trauma, so any story they read that they believe to be portrayed in a romanticized or sexualized light therefore must be romanticizing/sexualizing their trauma specifically.

I couldn't tell you the amount of times I've gotten the "stop sexualizing my trauma!!!!!!" or adjacent comments from antishippers that universally garner a response that basically boils down to

Like, bitch! I'm talking about my trauma! I literally did not even know you existed until you fucking commented!

[solradguy]

come on grandpa its fine. let your inner dadguy out

Maybe I should........

[smile-files]

i continue to find ii3 baffling. why did they make it (this isn't to hate on the season, i'm genuinely curious)

[scarletspider2the2ndpower]

“Kaine,” Web of Spider-Man (Vol. 3/2024), #1.

Writer: Steve Foxe; Penciler: Greg Land; Inker: Jay Leisten; Letterer: Frank D’Armata

[infizero]

the way gaster's presence permeates every inch of deltarune without him appearing or even being mentioned by name genuinely drives me fucking bonkers like its perhaps one of the most in-depth cases of haunting the narrative i've ever seen

[gender-euphowrya]

my therapist telling me i'm his point of reference when he deals with other trans patients

[fruixtii]

no one except me should be allowed to touch childhood friends to lovers tropes ever

[fluent-in-lesbianism]

this post is for people with a stutter:

have y’all ever stuttered while talking to someone (lmao duh natalie *end post*) and you could just tell by their facial expressions that they think you stuttered because they were so overwhelmingly pretty and/or charming that you were “rendered speechless”, but instead of explaining your very real speech impediment and risk knocking their newfound self-confidence, you just played along to make them feel special and give them a lil morale boost??? or is that just me?

[shippofuri]

very funny realization I'm having as i work on the highly ambitious "thistle is girl-coded" essay (which started out as a joke but the more i look into it the more real it becomes) is that a lot of people seem to be under the impression thistle's clothing is feminine, when it is very much not (unlike every woman in the kingdom, we never once see thistle in a dress.) it just reads as feminine to us because it's styled in a very flamboyant way (because he's a jester!)

but this actually plays into my theory. soon... you will all understand...

[awek-s]

one of my regulars came in and asked me what I wanted to do w my life and said he hopes it’s not this djsdnns and i said I wanna lecture in literature and we talked a little bit about it but he said he hopes i consider doing it elsewhere bc this country doesn’t deserve people like me 😩😣😭🫣🥰

[averinthine]

oh there's unanswered questions about my identity in here

[shurple]

dunno how to feel about the posts encouraging adhd medication on the dash today 💀