This is where I nerd out

Sawyer: Honestly? We think it's the Spirit of Liam guiding him.

But I just saw a video of a TT user explaining that they decided to do their own little social experiment — by walking up to drug dealers on the street, telling them there's a young woman with a baby who needs help with formula, and literally all of them immediately reached into their pockets. In this story, the OP did have a real neighbor with a baby who ended up getting some much needed baby supplies. Thanks to the charity of local drug dealers.

and my therapist was like, “so even at the worst times, you still have hope”

You graduated from high school, congratulations, you're qualified for this job you can work at for 40 years, afford a spouse, a house, 3 kids, a car, and 4 weeks off for vacation for a year. Oh, you went to college? Here, have more money, and put people on the moon.

There is a TikTok out there that summarizes this all very well. The "greatest" generation grew up in a world where they survived hell. They were born into the embers of a house fire of WWI, watched their house burn down again in the Great Depression, watched the entire forest burn in a forest fire of WWII and then did the dog meme...this is fine.

So they scotched guarded everything, fire proofed everything, made sure there was no way that their house was ever burning down again, made sure their kids' houses never burned down again, and made sure the forest would never burn again. And then they told their kids that, in a moment, the world could burn down if they weren't careful.

And those kids ran with it; paradise could burn to the ground unless they worked really hard to make sure it didn't...in an environment where that literally could no longer happen. And their takeaway was, "why do we need to keep the world from burning down with all of these things that keep the world from burning down if it didn't burn down while we were just, you know, being awesome. Murica."

And so when Ronald Fucking Reagan came along and tore it all down, all of it, everything that kept it from burning down, well, of course it did. But fire and rust are simply the process of oxidation in another material, one is just faster than another.

So, no, there was no great depression 2 or third world war (just wait...coming soon, thank you conservatives everywhere), but a 1 bed 1 bath house is $350k, in a market that pays a median $15 an hour, and idiot bootlickers are proud of working 60-70 hours a week to "support" their family...on a dual income.

i got the first dose and almost immediately fainted. they had to call in a whole medical team and it was a huge fucking deal

i was kicked out of the study and got a phone call later where they were supposed to tell me what the drug was, so i could avoid it in the future. they told me it was saline water. a placebo. i fainted from the placebo effect.

anyway, it's been a few months and i just got an email from the same department asking me to be a research participant in a new study: testing the effects of open-label placebo.

open label placebo is when the subjects and the researchers all know it's a placebo. they're testing the power of my mind. my power to imagine anything.

"Don't be in the way," he'd bark, "can you not see you're blocking people?" until I, too, was slinking in the shadows on the very margins of society, silent so I wouldn't be distracting or say the wrong thing, always sidling along so that I wasn't in the way, head so full of "100 things never to say," that I said nothing of any meaning, eyes darting around and under anyone, non-threatening, disengaged. I felt that I was allowed to focus on one set of things- physical objects that were mine. Books. Computer screens. Nature.

Can't annoy those.

He watched TV a lot. He was angry a lot, as you would be, although never violent, and we learned to skim and avoid and fade into nothing to avoid that anger. There were 3 or 4 people in the world he'd send darkly hilarious letters to, and the rest were as dark objects to avoid.

My mother seemed so different to me. I felt that she loved me, because she would spend time with me and sometimes smile and laugh and talk pleasantly and was always polite to servers, as she currently is to her carers. To me, she was always the social one, but she was almost always alone, and I thought that was normal for everyone, as it certainly was for me.

If you saw her, you would have seen a smile and warm, kind words, but the same slip. Never going too far, never demanding, never over-sharing, she followed every rule. Carts put aways after shopping, car fully in the spot, always patient, she kindly and properly worked among her work friends for decades, and only one would go to lunch with her for a while, then it all disappeared.

Two ways of walking through the world unseen and unnoticed, as on the edges of the trail where the dirt is packed and dry and no footprints are made.

How can you learn to engage when you've not seen engagement, when your conversation is so easily deflected and touches nothing, and you don't have the tools to probe? How can you show the love you feel toward those around you when you feel it radiating from you so strongly but those around you feel nothing, or else are repulsed?

How much of it is something with a name? How much is a sensory difference, or an autism, something undiagnosable that signals a fundamental incompatibility between our love and need for others and their feelings for us? And how much is simply never having been outside the shadows of the outskirts, and not knowing how to operate in the centre?

We may never know.

Who here in the shadows has not wondered why? Has not seen and - yearned? pined? words used for love of a person, but love of a world where we could be an integral part, useful and used, welcome and wanted, where our words might scratch upon occasion, but could also give joy? Who would not long to know what it would be like to be liked and loved by the world, to be so noted that when they are gone, they will be missed?

I ended up taking an $85,000/yr job as an optical research scientist at Corning instead.

It is an odd feeling, having a price put on your soul. I'd be a millionaire with a house by my mid-30s if I'd accepted that. And the offer is still open, in fact I'd have an even more generous one waiting for me with the skills I have now.

In all seriousness, if you have the right skillset, you can actually sell your soul. This very week. You will live in comfort and moderate luxury for all your days. Two of my family members did that work decades ago, until they couldn't stomach it any longer, and it set up the rest of their lives.

But I promise you, it's not worth it. It's been almost 50 years for one of them and it still haunts him. He says the worst part was the way they (him included) talked about human lives as things. Numbers on a spreadsheet, sterile corporate jargon in meetings. A lifetime later and you can still see it in his eyes when he talks about it.

Babe AO3 is a nonprofit. They do not exist under the ethics of capitalism. Fanfiction is legal because no money is ever exchanged around it. (All the money given to AO3 is used to maintain their servers and pay their lawyers to help keep fanfiction legal.)

… Two books later

“Before dinner, it was just the six of us. Are you curious what I gave everyone for an appetizer as we walked down the stairs?”