Cute girl at the shoe store: hey do you want me to put a special spray on your new shoes to protect them it'll only cost an extra £5
Me a poor idiot who doesn't actually give a fuck about shoes knowing full well im gonna be walking through mud with them when i get home: sure
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because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.
you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.
you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.
don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.
if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.
you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:
how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!
aren't you happy yet?
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I was just now debating who should receive my therapy bills for the kiss scene in ep6...
Ofc there is David Tennant, full of desperation, grasping at straws. We cannot see his eyes, but we know damn well that they are watery and full of fear and awareness that this may be his last chance.
But then there is Michael Sheen whose conflicted attitude already prompted me to write a (not so) short analysis in my notes. Aziraphale whose yearning and longing for Crowley is so palpable, whose hands look for some sort of contact and embrace, whose pain we can see so clearly when he pushes Crowley away and whose entire body language is just filled with dilemmas, with antonyms, whose internal conflict is so tangible.
And then there is Neil, the mastermind. The one who is there pulling the strings. The one who made this scene a parallel of the scene from s1 where Crowley pushes Aziraphale to the wall, saying "I'm not nice", but this time he just wants him to understand, that Aziraphale is nice, more than nice, moreover that Crowley MAY BE nice, but they are just not fit for Heaven, they belong only in eachother. And the hurt after Aziraphale doesn't accept this unspoken but so clearly communicated argument...
In conclusion, they should just split it
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in recent years, there's been a push in therapeutic circles to shift the language from "attention-seeking" to "connection-seeking" behavior.
i was an attention-seeker. i was the textbook example of an attention-seeker. i was a troublemaker. i would self-harm. i destroyed my own relationships. i was uncontrolled, dramatic, sensitive. i took everything personally. i had "nothing" to be depressed "about," but made a big show of how sad i was nonetheless. i was really unsafe about myself in a lot of ways.
the strange thing about that is: it meant others could ignore me. the prevailing wisdom behind knowing something is "attention seeking" is to say: well, since you want it that bad, you're not getting any. it meant i was lower-on-the-list of concern. it meant an eye-roll.
the belief was that: since i was obviously doing these things on purpose, it would be bad behavioral training if i was "rewarded" for it. it would "teach me" that i simply had to make enough fuss, and i'd finally get all that missing attention and love. no, it was better to ignore that stuff.
i was suffering. and it felt like - oh, it doesn't matter how loudly i am in pain, nobody gives a shit about if i'm living or dying.
awhile ago, i went through my journals from that time. a lot of them read the same thing. in them, i am convinced i am invisible. that nobody wants to hear me, to see me. that i could die or vanish and nobody would even notice. i didn't even want attention - not really - because it was always dismissive, mocking. nothing i ever did would be good enough to get someone to actually-worry about me.
that's a terrifying thing for me to read as an adult. that is a child who fully has no problem committing. that is a child who has no concept of feeling loved. the most basic human instinct is missing from her life.
i needed help. i didn't know how to ask for it. i was a kid. i was a kid in a bad home, and whenever i thought things couldn't get worse there - they almost always did.
and the ways i showed that - the ways i tried to deal with that - they made others dismiss me. i wasn't suffering prettily. after all, if i was really in trouble, why wouldn't i just march into the first counselor's office and ask someone to help me? i had the opportunities, right? what did i think would happen, exactly? that someone would finally stand up and do something? who even wants that kind of responsibility?
i heard connection-seeking for the first time about three months ago. my therapist mentioned it when we were talking about my history. it rang some kind of horrible bell, deep inside me. i don't know what she said in the rest of her sentence. i just started... crying.
"oh no", i said to her. "i think i just realized: i have no idea how to forgive them for minimizing the ways i was hurting."
how many other kids, though. how many other kids were out there drowning, snatching around for a lifevest, some kind of rope - how many were straight-up ignored.
how many of those kids aren't gonna get old.
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One random thing that I love is the tireless effort of birders/ornithologists to try and phonetically render all the bird calls into text in an accurate manner. I am so bad at processing sounds that I could literally never do this. Like how many times would you have to listen to that bird call before deciding which letters to place in what order??
I have been challenging myself to listen to a bird call, try and write down my translation, then look up the accepted birder one to compare… let’s just say I am not fluent in bird
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