i am truly being so brave with my job applications even reaching out and asking for favours which is something that goes against every survival instinct i have

linkedin bombarding me with job offers in international arbitration i could so easily get...this is the devil speaking

on a less serious note, this is a huge point of interest for me re: my unfulfilled hr au. yuna as a person in an inescapably disempowered position using her parental influence over shane to raise him towards the specific end of using the aspects of social mobility available to him to complement her own constrictions. which i mean it is also just what happens canonically. i just want to have a closer look at his later emergence into a role where the now achieved elements of social mobility force him to reckon with a newly acquired ability to harm her, while not entirely displacing her original influence. for my own entertainment

a lot of my experiences when i was younger are even difficult to comprehend under the term for said reasons. for a long time my mother had enough financial resources from state pension, alimony etc. that big elements of domestic labour were delegated externally (very thankful for this and that we can still afford some minor delegations). but when you are es. babysitting children everyone understands that just staying with them and entertaining them and being generally available to their whims counts as caretaking labour even if you are not driving them to school. and for essentially the entirety of my late childhood/ adolescence this was mostly my role: not that i had zero domestic chores, but a big chunk of my time was spent just being a constant presence of support that couldn't leave the house in order to provide company, fetch things, absorb bad moods and calm them, deal with medical emergencies when needed, make the effort of learning what neither of us knew and acquire functionalities necessary to our common existence, explaining the things i learned etc. is this parentification? for many people a child staying home with their parents and only leaving when they allow it and listening to their every indication - regardless of whose needs are being fulfilled - is a normal parent/child arrangement. i lived it as incredibly taxing and suffocating, it took up so much space in my life i still describe myself in therapy as a bare rock with no personhood attached to it. but if i were to identify some specificity to the experience it would be the construction of this false position of power for me with the specific intention of justifying extraction actually allowed by disempowerment. which is a pretty common ground for inversion of blame present in many other instances of physical/emotional/sexual violence against children. it is more clarificatory to me to work in continuity rather than strict separation with these experiences

i do hate the term parentification tho lol i use it for ease of communication because it mostly conveys the factual circumstances i want people to envision but it's clunky and cheesy and genuinely has little explanatory power

a big issue i have with the inability to identify concrete cases of parentification with anything adjacent to abusive circumstances is also that it often clearly comes from an implicit belief, that people will deny bolstering, that abuse has nothing to do with the fulfilment of real needs. you can see traces of the same belief in the insistence to debate whether sex is a need in order to oppose justifications of sexual abuse. a division of the world between people that have real needs, with the concession that the ends justify the means, and actual abusers, which do it for the love the game. i think this is a very poor reconstruction of how extraction works in interpersonal and wider social power differential and a confused ground on which to built political positions. most people leveraging their power to obtain something from others are doing it to fulfill a need of some sort. even the act of hurting in itself, of wanting to use another's body for the sole purpose of inscribing pain into it, can come from real psychological needs. the lack of need is not the reason these acts of coercion are harmful to others and should be prevented from happening

parentification is a term i use with ambivalence because i find it so tautological that it effectively explains nothing regarding the content of the parental role being reversed and the processes involved in this reversal, as well as insufficiently interrogating whether a true reversal exists rather than the simple fulfilment of normalised duties children owe to parents. still, taking it at face value for a second, i often feel a disconnect when i go from discussing this experience abstractly to practical circumstances, in the way people locate the power in the relationship. for a term like parentification to apply meaningfully at all a parent needs to be "failing" in their mandated role to some extent and that failure can easily come at the heel of various forms of societal disempowerment that the child may or may not share (es. disability, various forms of discrimination on account of gender race sexuality, alcoholism, domestic abuse etc). and this disempowerment is, in my experience, pretty often read as absolute in a way that simultaneously minimises and obscures via naturalisation that, as marginalised as they may be vis-à-vis society as a whole, those same parents are not necessarily disempowered vis-à-vis the child specifically.

i can just tell i am going to be a huge asshole today. out of the claustrophobic feeling of being surrounded and pushed in a corner

last post was brought to you by: just heard through the grapevine i wasn't invited to something and i am trying to retrace my steps in the last like five months to determine what set it off this time. i thought we were getting along...did i not laugh loud enough at someone's joke...what should i even apologise for is the thing give me something to work with

my mother's family does this incredible thing where sometimes they get hugely mad at me for entirely obscure reasons (read: they usually do something shitty and i am not good enough at hiding/mitigating my reaction, which is then reframed as me being shitty to them) that are always truly minuscule minor things and they don't react to them immediately but stew over them in silence and at some point they decide to manifest their anger in incredibly oblique ways like...not inviting me to an event for which i expected no invitation. and then they get even more mad when i don't perceive the slight and don't come groveling for forgiveness. and it's just all incredibly bizzarre i've had feuds with them that lasted months without me knowing it bc i just wasn't home enough from work to pick up the mysterious signs of their anger. months where i was living a peaced out life while their heads were slowly exploding. like at some point just come pick the fight?

men in sports often get addressed as perpetual teenagers, either coddingly or derogatorily, to indicate their fame and money insulate them from many frictions held as thresholds to adult life but shane and ilya live a different kind of permanent adolescence. the narrative beats of struggling to hide a relationship from your parents, sneaking around so they don't find out etc. are staples in teenage romances for a reason: it is unusual that they remain such a vital part of the life of two guys in their mid-twenties that have effectively achieved economic independence at 18

think i've said it over dms but one of the reasons i think hr lends itself very well to readings under the lens of possible incestuous abuse is that the show presents an overarching investment in tracking the interactions between sex and family. i am not referring to the simple impact of familial history on sexual preferences - though the material allows for inferences in this sense. ilya and shane's families intrude in their sex life not merely through the downstream recalling of metabolised personal idiosyncrasies but as a much more immediate presence. every attempt to leave them at the door sees them knocking and trickling into the room - yuna halting ilya in the elevator, calls and calls on ilya's phone interrupting their encounters, the final infraction of shane's space shattering their tentative efforts to find their independent footing. scott hunter's life is impacted by the death of his parents but in their absence his story gets to be that of a man meeting another man, creating their own life. ilya and shane are forever sons. it's not that they never grow up, they are not overtly infantilised, but they can never create an existence where their first identifying label isn't being children of someone. with what little we see of the actual hockey world, their affair is stifled, on screen, in large part by familial expectations. sex can only happen in a secret, fragile bubble until those exist and push and pull in different directions. access to a relational configuration they find fulfilling isn't achieved through a gained liberation from these pressures but through an alignment of the streams: for them to be together ilya's father needs to die and ilya needs to become son to shane's parents. the bubble bursts and their sex life gets finally absorbed, inextricable, into a wider netting of family interests made congruent. there is happiness in this for them, it's not a bleak imposition. but nonetheless the structuring conflict of their story shows the sexual development of children as a contested ground between personal and familial desires, with tension easing only when they can be made to mesh. interesting for me to wonder why this forced abandon is lived with such relief

had a popsicle and feel better 👍 i knew it was the heat