From the Fringes of Sleeplessness

and then I thought about what it must have been like for the first humans to let a fucking wolf, maybe only a few generations from the wild, behold their infant child. Like man can u believe that? Maybe this alliance is only a few years old and sure you’ve seen the wolf’s kids but now you’ve got one of your own. And even though you’ve seen this wolf tear out the throats of creatures that could kill you, this wolf is your family. This wolf is your friend, you love them and they love you and you gotta show ‘em the new kid, look, friend, I had a child. I know you are wild and dangerous, but look at this, my most precious thing, sniff him, give him a lil lick, his children and your children will be bound together for thirty thousand fucking years because I love you

-found an axe formely belonging to a friend who is now in jail

-axe (stolen)

-earrings made out of dentures

-flavored condoms

-a quilt

-hello kitty sweater (stolen from a DIFFERENT ex-friend with a felony charge)

-deer spine

-baseball sized wad of human hair

-""sex apron""

-uranium glass plate

-pile of non-uranium non-car glass

-rollerblades

-complete phantom of the opera cd set

-magic the gathering cards mold-ified into a brick

-lego millennium falcon

-a CUTLASS??? (for "self defense")

-the back bumper of the car

-an entire fucking ant colony

and finally, perhaps the most disturbing,

even if it sucks, even if they're saying things you want to refute, even if you think refuting will help things because Everyone Will Understand if You Just Speak Clearly Enough. even if you want to vent publicly because you think you deserve that much, acknowledging them is almost always the wrong move. you're just pouring gas and making sure that those couple little sparks turn into a fire. and all of them love to see you upset, not just the nazis threatening rape. sucks when it's your own, but hey, hurt people hurt people!

engaging is bad for a few different reasons. the first is that these people feed on attention. reply publicly, and that will give someone enough juice to make a new account every few days for a year plus, sending you paragraphs of insults mixed with strange accusations. whereas if you'd ignored them, maybe that obsessive phase would've only lasted a couple weeks. genuinely, you can create your own stalkers by reacting.

the second is that by engaging publicly, you're platforming them. even if you just post literal puppies and rainbows, there will be people hate-following who are pissed off about how many notes your latest puppies and rainbows photo got (because if you got more notes than them, it's punching up). they will see you engaging with harassment and go, hey, I can do that too! and that's how you get harasser mitosis.

platforming also has another problem. most people are good, but by the sheer quantity of people you'll be exposed to online, some will be malicious. if you are refuting something incorrect ("I never killed that man because I wasn't even in Florida on that day!") they will go right to the original slander ("they killed that man in Florida"), copy/paste, and spread it. or they will forgo the copy/pasting and just let it mutate in their memory so that it's a whole new thing by the time they spread it ("they killed several men and women in Florida, and also California").

currently, I'm in the 'block everyone who could potentially hate-follow and harass me' phase, but there is also some danger to that, because people see blocking as you acknowledging them, which (depending on the person) might be enough gasoline to rev them up. but it does at least provide some barrier, because making new accounts to block evade takes a modicum of energy, and if they're continually starved of further interactions, that energy will eventually fade.

The problem wasn’t what I had access to. It was that I didn’t have access to a safe adult I could actually talk to; someone I could trust to help me without immediately cutting me off from everything and everyone. I remember getting messages from strangers on Skype. I didn’t even respond. But when my parents found out, they banned me from using it entirely. That meant losing most of my contact with friends outside of school. So what did I do? I went behind their backs. And once I was hiding, I couldn’t tell them when something actually dangerous was happening, like when I started being groomed. By the time things escalated, I was already alone with it.

I think about an episode of Scared Straight where a girl was dragged through a prison because she’d been talking to adult men online. She wasn’t doing that because she was reckless or malicious; she was lonely. Her parents weren’t present, she was being bullied at school, and these men gave her attention, told her she was pretty, told her she mattered. She was already being harmed. And the adults in her life responded by terrorizing her. Humiliating her. Calling her a slut. Telling her she deserved it. Breaking her to pieces.

What lesson does that actually teach? Not “this is dangerous, come to us.” It teaches: If you get hurt, we will hurt you more. Do you really think that makes her stop, or does it just make the predators look safer by comparison? They might as well have driven her straight into the jaws of those predators with torches and pitchforks. Because when every path back to safety is lined with punishment, kids don’t run away from danger. They run deeper into it.

If you want kids to be safe, stop treating them like problems to control and start treating them like people worth protecting. Stop ripping away their autonomy the second they make a mistake or encounter something risky. Stop teaching them that honesty will cost them everything.

I have gotten so much shit over the years for saying that if my kid read fiction or anything else online that she wasn't ready to see, I'd check in with her on how she was doing mentally and emotionally, and then talk to her about how she saw it, and how to avoid seeing things that she didn't want to see in the future. People have portrayed this as me being A-OK with my kid being exposed to anything willy-nilly, no matter how out-there, both bc I wouldn't have punished her and because I didn't see "my kid got access to something Too Mature For Her online" as a reason to sanitize the internet.

But here's the thing: I've dealt with situations like that more than once. Now, my daughter is in her mid-twenties at this point, and we're far past the question of "can she look at naughty fanfic online?" Clearly she can and whether she does is so not my business. But back in the day, she ran into stuff she didn't want to see more than once, she ran into people who bullied her, she had some experiences that put up my hackles for her safety, she had someone try to steal her identity...

... and none of those things became critical issues. Why?

Because she knew that she could come and talk to me. She knew she could come and talk to me and that my first thought wasn't going to be "oh, you're Bad and In Trouble and I'm going to Punish You so that you're Good next time," but "You have a Problem and we're going to solve it together so that in the future, you know how to solve it yourself, and you know that if you need my help, I will absolutely help you."

And when one of her problems was "I've figured out that I'm a girl and I need your help making my body stop doing the wrong puberty for me," she came to me then, too. And when one of her problems was "I'm having a Weird Symptom that could be nothing or could be Something Big," she came to me, too. And—crucially—all of those things are the same thing, at the core.

My kid had a Problem. She needed my help. There were times when we had to have conversations afterwards about the consequences of the things she might have done, but my first priority was always making sure she was okay, and that she knew that if she had a Problem, my first concern is always going to be helping her fix it.

And you know what? She still calls me if she needs to talk through her problems. These days it's more, "Hey, I don't know what to do about this problem at work," but she still calls me.

Someday, I'm not going to be around anymore to help her fix things, and in anticipation of that fact, it is and was my job to equip her with the tools she'll need to take care of herself when I can't help her anymore. If I'm not teaching her how to deal with things, if I'm cutting her off from resources, if I'm not actually there for helping her solve the problems, all I'm doing is setting her up for a future where her parents are gone and she doesn't know how to fix shit, because we didn't teach her.

The new magic stops working after three days and every spell uses proprietary runes.

Red Slender Loris (Loris tardigradus), family Lorisidae, endemic to Sri Lanka

ENDANGERED.

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