raconteur

You are allowed to have whatever emotions you want. No one can control your emotions. Emotions are healthy responses to things.

You are not allowed to have behaviors that are harmful just because you have certain emotions. Your behaviors are what you can control, and they are far easier to control than your emotions.

You can be jealous about someone or their talents until you turn green, but it is harmful to yourself and to that person if you try to sabotage them because of it. You can be so angry you can literally feel your temperature rise, but this does not give you permission to rage at others.

you may be sex-repulsed; that doesn’t mean sex is dirty and bad. maybe you were bullied by teenage girls; that doesn’t mean teenage girls are a force of evil. perhaps a villain in a work of fiction reminds you of someone who abused you; that doesn’t mean people who enjoy that character or that fiction are abusive. your feelings about those things are absolutely valid, and it’s not right for people to tell you you shouldn’t feel that way. but it’s also not right for you to act out against others based on those feelings.

that instinct to generalize served our species well when we were hunter-gatherers living in small bands in a hostile wilderness. you nibble a delicious-looking berry, you throw up, you know that berry is BAD and you make the yuck face whenever you see it so the other hominids know it’s a bad one. but in the modern world, in the information age, there are so many complex things you might encounter, you’re going to have badfeels about a lot of things that aren’t actually across-the-board bad.

MONTERREY, MEXICO.