Just Fuck Me Up

I still hate most of the foods that I wouldn't eat as a kid. Almost all the variation in my diet came from trying foods I wasn't exposed to as a kid.

In fact, there are lots of foods I would force myself to eat as a kid that I don't bother with anymore because I don't like them

"you have to stop being a picky eater and learn to tolerate new foods..."

gagging is extremely stressful. it is such an intensely, sharply unpleasant experience with the added stress of trying not to spit your mouthful of food all over yourself/the table. The sweating and heart palpitations of trying to force down a swallow of something that is viscerally repulsing you is an exquisitely negative feeling. My palms are sweating just thinking about it.

This experience can cause novelty itself to cause fear and apprehension. Just the prospect of eating something unfamiliar can cause fear and nausea, because past experiences were so incredibly negative

now, the physiological effect of fear is that it suppresses the activity of the digestive system. this deadens your appetite and makes it more likely that eating will make you feel sick. So the negative experience is compounded

but on a milder level, the depression of simply not enjoying food is very negative for your life. I can say confidently that the low quality of cafeteria food at my college increased my day to day depression. eating is one of life's pleasures and when it becomes a repulsive chore, that builds a slow resentment of being alive

therefore, it is not good to force yourself to eat things you do not like, instead it is better to cultivate greater curiosity and adventurousness regarding foods you may have never been exposed to before. importantly, you must do it in a safe enviroment because before you can enjoy food you have to undo all the negative experiences of being forced to eat food you hate

cooking recipes for yourself can be a good way to do that because it is creative and active which gives a sense of playfulness which leads to power and agency

do not try new things in social gathering where there is pressure from other people

foraging and gardening is incredibly helpful because the food is fresh and there is a great sense of security and connectedness in it. you know where the food comes from you know that it is good you know it came from the earth beneath your feet. eating something right off the plant is an experience that unlocks your inquisitive and animalistic side instead of making you feel pressures and stresses from social expectation.

You feel like an animal trying to bite something investigating whether it is food. Does a wild animal get yelled at when it bites something that is not edible and spits it out? of course not.

Also once you have had positive experiences eating things from outside your instincts tend to be more accessible to you. humans in the modern world are taught that outside things are not for eating, generally, so they silence the instinct that urges them to eat plants.

Personally i think this is a big part of many aversions to vegetables, if you are told that leaves outside are all poison and bad, it is hard to turn off that apprehension with a leaf on your plate. but if you experience eating plants that grow out of the ground in the world around you, that can awaken that instinct toward plants as food again

❌ False

✅ True

And you know what is "visual shorthand" for evil and ugliness, for entirely racist and VERY antisemitic reasons?

my face.

Only at specific points in the last few centuries of history, in specific places, am I allowed to be Beautiful.

in almost all of the last century and ALL of this one, my face is "striking" at best. If they've never seen European paintings from the 1800s or the works of Charles Dana Gibson, they'll just think I look Odd. But I don't get to be Beautiful, and neither does anyone who "doesn't Fit" the tiny narrow white-centric antisemitic bigoted eugenic standards of what makes someone Look Evil or Look Ugly or Look Pretty or Look Moral/Righteous.

I know an artist who does a lot of religious work. He did a nativity scene with a hundred angels in it. Every last one was some shade of White. You could tell he never even questioned it. not once.

I made this transparent PNG the night he died in preparation for one of the many ways I was going to memorialize him--a surface rug in his likeness that I planned on laying directly in the line of his favourite sunbeam. And I uploaded that PNG here, because this is the website where people post their cats.

I was not expecting the reception I got. Many people have pointed out that this post has more reblogs than likes, and how insane that is in 2025 when reblog culture is at an all time low. I didn't even talk about the fact that Burger passed away in the original post, it wasn't a tearjerker reblog bait or anything like that. People just loved Burger that much, in the same way I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such an ugly kitten.

Anyways, it's really special to me that so many people have reblogged my best friend. I made this PNG to memorialize him in a completely different way, and you all wound up doing just that in ways I never even imagined.

Thank you. Wherever he is, I know the sun is shining.