THE 4THDIMENSION

Chasing across the South Plains and Midwest

If you ever wondered why they call tattoos and piercings "unprofessional" and "unsophisticated"

Town by Night with Procession

but there are plenty of therapists whose default mode encourages you to prioritize your comfort, the things that will let you fit more easily into societal expectations, or both. and even from those people you can learn valuable skills; I still recommend therapy and have been in therapy myself for many years. BUT unless you are very lucky with your therapist, it is unlikely that you will say "I feel powerless about the state of the world" and they will point you towards building power

and so, especially among people who can afford access to therapy (in the United States, that is mostly people with salaried jobs and/or young people with with parents whose insurance they can ride on), there's a lot of the message going around that the way to alleviate your distress about the world is to not expect to be able to do much about it, and confine your hopes to personal change or MAYBE the off-chance of small incredibly unimaginative social changes. that is, a demographic with relatively more social power but many shared interests with those who can't access therapy is being told that they do not have social power, that the idea of people helping each other is nice but "let's focus on you," and, all in all, that they should soothe themselves enough to not disturb their pursuit of normal-looking undisruptive happiness

and I just--whether it's therapy or not, I would really like to see more places where conversations about emotions turn towards "then let's figure out what concrete thing you are going to do about a specific part of the suffering/injustice in the world that is in front of you, because having agency and working together with others is hard but even when it involves pain, it's rewarding in a way that distraction and self-soothing cannot be"