The Unbearable Awkwardness Of Being

let’s get snuggly with mama

it's so insane when you encounter another full grown adult who does the "actually swear words are juvenile/annoying/indicative of low intelligence" thing unironically. how are you in your 30s and still a hall monitor

Best comment I just saw "Helen of Troy was perfectly cast, because all these men are fighting about her."

interview with the masquerade

vampire: the vampire

It's nuts how common it is to not allow children to be angry, even (especially) in households where adults are angry all the time. As a child I knew my own anger was unacceptable--not just expressing it outwardly but feeling it at all. So now as an adult my immediate reaction to my own anger is often to feel guilt instead of like. Noticing when someone is being rude or unfair or my boundaries are being violated or whatever. fucked up.

to this day "who is allowed to be angry" has been an incredible benchmark for teasing out who, in abusive situations with mutual accusations and DARVO happening, is being abusive and who is being abused. one of my favorite resources about this, the Creative Interventions Toolkit, phrases the question "who sets the weather?" in the relationship and I think about it so so often when I think about my own childhood. I was parentified in a way that set me up for future abusive relationships, because I had to soothe my parents' anger while not being allowed to feel angry myself. I am extremely grateful to everyone outside myself - friends, therapists, partners - who's gotten angry on my behalf about how I'm treated or let me know something I'd been excusing or blaming myself for was actually Not Okay. I guess the good news here is that it's possible to learn how to access anger again in a healthy way, it just takes support, like doing physical therapy for a muscle that didn't develop quite right.

on my "don't walk to metlife" post I kept seeing people say that drivers would "bergentruck" pedestrians on the turnpike and it turns out that that's a reference to an Undertale meme where a character purposefully runs over people, but the portion of the jersey turnpike that goes to metlife is bergen county, and I had just instantly accepted that there was a term specifically referring to jersey drivers from there. I didn't even question it. Neither would you, if you had ever driven there.