A Series of Obsessions...with Series

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.

No more measles. Eradicated. Forever.

X-Men #26 - "Danger Room" (2026)

I remember when I was around 13 and read the physical copy of LoTR in English (not my first language), and I had to have a dictionary on me at all times. Yes, constant breaks to find the word meaning were tedious. Yet still, I got through it, because I wanted to read it. And I learned so many new words in the process.

You, a fic reader on AO3, have it so easy: highlight the word -> right-click -> choose the find word in Google option. AND THIS IS LITERALLY IT.

Language is not decoration laid over thought. It is the matter from which thoughts are made. It gives thought shape, precision, and a life beyond the person thinking it.

When I choose to say that a candle guttered rather than flickered, I am not replacing an easy word with a difficult one for the pleasure of making someone open a dictionary. A flickering flame wavers. A guttering flame struggles, threatening to go out. Change the word and you change what is happening in the room.

That does not mean difficulty is automatically a virtue. A writer can be imprecise in six syllables as easily as in one. Obscurity is not profundity. The question should not be, “Will every reader already know this word?” It should be, “Is this the right word?”

Readers are free not to enjoy difficult prose, just as writers are free to choose the register in which they write. But asking every text to be frictionless is not the same thing as asking it to be accessible. It is asking language never to demand anything of us, and in turn never teach us or reveal anything to us.

If books may contain only words we already know, reading cannot enlarge our vocabulary. If our vocabulary never enlarges, neither does our ability to understand and communicate ideas. Looking up an unfamiliar word is not evidence that the writer has failed. Sometimes it is evidence that reading is doing part of its work.

This matters because language is how private thought becomes public argument. An idea cannot become law, doctrine, discovery, or common cause until it has been given a form that other minds can receive.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

That was not a description of the world in 1776. It was, in point of fact … a fiction. It was not a principle its author lived by. Yet the sentence made a claim large enough for later generations to seize and turn against the exclusions of the men who wrote it.

Alexis De Toqueville noted in Democracy in America that nearly everyone could read, that reading materials were almost universally available, and even farmers and tradesman spoke with an intellectual clarity common only among the most educated classes in Europe.

No, encountering scrying in a fanfiction is not the Declaration of Independence. But deep literacy does not descend from the heavens. We cultivate it in smaller encounters: reading a poem twice, following an unfamiliar allusion, looking up a word because the world on the page matters enough to us.

A functioning society depends upon people who can understand difficult language, distinguish one meaning from another, and recognize when words are being used to enlighten, persuade, conceal, or deceive. That capacity is not innate. We acquire it by reading beyond the boundaries of what we already know.

Use the easy word when it is the exact word. Use the difficult word when it is the exact word. But do not ask writers to make the world smaller simply because learning its name takes five seconds.

Part of socializing and having friends is being a good listener even when you don't actually give a shit about the subject.

Your are hurting other people's feelings when you bluntly respond with "Anyway..." and then change the topic.

It can not always be about your preferred topic.

Except this time it's all correctly labeled so when I start experiencing issues related to them I'm not just drowning in undefined pain.

I'm like: "ah shit the Childhood Neglect container is leaking all over everything! I better mop it up and put it in a new container"

And sometimes something comes up and I'm like: "ah. This belongs in the religious trauma box. Let me put it away and then I can do art until I feel better"