The Abyss Winks Back

I was sat in bed with a friend watching a documentary today and I suddenly felt my younger deeply lonely self look at me with awe

It turns out you can dream and dream and dream for years that it gets better and then you blink and look around and notice you’re having a good day

forbidden blue raspberry candy

listen to me, this is so so important: you've gotta get used to really giving it your 60% as a default. like don't half-ass it necessarily but try not to go over 70% or so of an ass. you'll feel better and live a happier more fulfilled life, and on the rare occasions where you do need to lock the fuck in you'll be able to pull off bullshit that the sad miserable wretches giving it their 100% can never dream off, because they're busy draining themselves dry and you have energy reserves to spare.

This is actually what I was adviced to do at the work rehabilitation program I went to. Hasn't left my mind since. 10/10 solid advice

adding to this. the probabilistic framing is great but there’s another layer: fiction is working under serious time and space constraints. grief in real life might look like eating cereal at 11pm and forgetting to answer texts for a week. you don’t always have a week. so characters end up doing things that are statistically rare but emotionally efficient, and that’s not bad writing, that’s compression. the name-dropping dialogue thing is still a crutch though, because it’s not compressing anything, it’s just substituting for actual voice work. heightened behavior = often necessary. heightened language = usually lazy.