May the Bridges We Burn Light Our Way Home

My point here was not to provide a platform for bitching about specific religions and ideologies, but rather to point out that the things that call themselves by those names aren’t necessarily very related to the things that called themselves those names in the past or in other places.

I've found that in life, if you've got a problem that only has one obvious solution and you're not doing it, your problem isn't the problem that has a solution, your problem is figuring out why you're not doing it.

I think my biggest issue with exercise is that it's not voluntary. It's like a goddamn saw trap. You either hurt yourself or your body hurts you. It doesn't feel voluntary if someone walked up to you and put a gun to your head like "hey stab yourself in the leg or I will stab you in the leg! :)" and then stabbing yourself in the leg takes like 20-40 minutes out of your day every goddamn day forever until you die.

None of this is intended as criticism. The specific concerns of a young adult audience beget specific literary techniques.

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YA writing is preoccupied with the identity of the lead characters, prior to their actions, social obligations, or personal history. It explores the characters' castes, categories, lineages, and innate powers. The protagonist may challenge or accept these categories, but they will invariably be framed as a social consensus despite being alien to the reader.

YA writing explores worlds of calcified shame, and shame is a secondary antagonist. The fantastical setting is defined by a prior conflict that was only partially resolved: the adults of the story are often veterans of this conflict. The setting has achieved a fragile stasis that codifies a degree of injustice, and enforces secrecy or propaganda concerning the nature of the conflict. The protagonist acts as the representative of a new generation that provides solutions to this dilemma.

YA protagonists are righteous. Their suffering is in most respects unfair or unjust, and moral clarity is a nearly universal factor in driving the plot forward. Changes in loyalty are precipitated by new information, especially about the moral depravity of governing bodies. Character development is established through a period of grueling physical or social exile, in which protagonists learn the virtue of persistence.

YA writing styles are straightforward. Sentences are simple without being sparse, while events are described literally and cinematically. Pacing and tropes are typically a pastiche of romance, murder mystery, and fantasy/sci-fi genres. They avoid challenging the reader at the level of structure or prose.

YA narratives are epics. Stakes rise from the personal to the universal over the course of the narrative. The protagonist will establish a circle of friends, and earn the attention of a powerful general or sage who will endow them with a grand destiny. Ultimately, characters end governments, determine the fate of wars, and ignite revolutions.

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experiencing consequences for legitimately bad behavior often feels absolutely terrible. even worse than being punished for something you didn't do, in my experience! if you allow your emotions to dictate whether you think you have been mistreated, you're going to treat the people YOU mistreat like they have harmed you unforgivably.

it's an empathetic injury, that's why it's *so* fast, so severe, and the "reasoning" can change so much even when the same story is told again; it's not pre-planned, there's no mastermind string-pulling or whatever, it's "Ah fuck, why do I feel so bad, it can't be my fault, so I need to explain why it is your fault".

I wish I could tell past me this. It would have shattered a lot of the illusions of control built into my environment if I had been able to see how many of the lies were just made up on the literal spot and that the people telling them were not expecting their actions to have consequences.

the biggest thing I've learned about people who get into abusive and manipulative behavior patterns is that something can be absolutely terrible and indefensible and also, at its core, DEEPLY pathetic.

we don't want to see people who do that kind of harm as pathetic because there's this feeling that that somehow excuses their behavior. it doesn't. a lot of the time its behavior that they saw Work for people with power over them when they were children, and now they think it's the only behavior that Works when interacting with people over whom they have power. because it connects back to early developmental learning re: interpersonal interactions, this also often explains why people approach these situations like they're the victim -- it's a child headspace, it's a path that was originally trodden during childhood, and childhood is a state defined by a lack of autonomy. which I think also acts as a way to insulate people from the need to consider other people's experiences and feelings -- when you're a kid it's absolutely vital to defensively hyperrocus on your own experience because nobody else will do that for you. no one does that for children, generally. and so, many people learn that prioritizing their feelings = dismissing other people's. anyway I'm rambling now and none of this is like. I don't have citations for it, lol, but this is the best way I have found to conceptualize these dynamics in Learning terms. because I truly do think that so many things in life are about Learning, and how we are initially taught that the world works.

Which is maybe distinction without difference, because it plays out the same, more or less. Just, rather than externalizing an emotional response that scolds people around you when they don't act the way you want, it's more... very nicely and kindly explaining to people what they actually think and feel, and why they acted in that way and what it means. Very heartfelt and earnest emotional processing conversations where what happened in what order and who felt what and why are rehashed into mush and reshaped.

In some cases, I think this can result from a failed attempt to mitigate the first type of response. Someone who is aware that they need to learn to analyze their own motivations and how their emotions shape their actions, and that they need to learn how to manage themself to avoid setting themself up to be hurt - but, whose sense-of-self boundary is bad enough that they also apply these tactics to everyone around them in a continuum with themself. Analyzing other people's actions as if your own emotional state was a universal baseline, a fundamental truth which they are at all times aware of. As if they were extensions of you. And trying to manage them into place in your emotional schema, like unruly twitchy limbs.

To have a usable model of someone else's emotional state, you MUST acknowledge that you could be wrong about it. If your model of them operates on the assumption that you know what they really feel, you're modeling them as an extension of you.

For me, one of the worst parts of untangling this was relearning that it IS normal for someone's understanding of a situation to change over time - as their emotional state changes, their intepretation of what happened will also shift. As long as someone is not expecting you to instantly and seamlessly comply with their reinterpretation, this is actually... fine. I had learned such a fear response to someone's interpretation shifting that I felt a need to create a stable understanding of What Actually Happened And Why, and to have that be untouchable. Unfortunately... that's exactly how this behavior propagates forward. My stable understanding wasn't actually intrinsically more stable than anyone else's, and now I was the one trying to force people to comply with the conceit that it was - that is, to edit their understanding seamlessly to match changes in mine that I was willfully unaware of.

Abuse is self-reinforcing, in a Pavlovian, classic-conditioning way: people do it because, in the moment, it works. hitting or screaming at someone makes them stop!

--but it doesn't ever last, because the root problem hasn't been addressed. so they'll do it again, and screaming won't work as well the second time, so you scream or hit harder, and then whoever you're screaming at learns to hide the behaviour and avoid you, and the relationship has been broken.

this also applies to manipulation, insults, guile, any pattern of abuse: in the moment, if all you're looking at is Right That Moment, it works. it is so easy to learn that Abuse Works To Stop Things You Don't Want.

--but it never works long term, and perpetuating abuse, even Just Occasionally, Just When They Deserve It, Just As Self Defence, ruins your relationships and hurts everyone involved.