Sailing to Iceland

Taken from Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson, Psy.D. A summary of the tips the book hands you on how to recognize emotionally healthy people.

They’re realistic and reliable

They work with reality rather than fighting it. They see problems and try to fix them, instead of overreacting with a fixation on how things should be.

They can feel and think at the same time. The ability to think even when upset makes an emotionally mature person someone you can reason with. They don’t lose their ability to see another perspective just because they aren’t getting what they want.

Their consistency makes them reliable. Because they have an integrated sense of self, they usually won’t surprise you with unexpected inconsistencies.

They don’t take everything personally. They can laugh at themselves and their foibles. They’re realistic enough to not feel unloved just because you made a mistake.

They’re respectful and reciprocal

They respect your boundaries. They’re looking for connection and closeness, not intrusion, control or enmeshment. They respect your individuality and that others have the final say on what their motivations are. They may tell you how they feel about what you did, but they don’t pretend to know you better than you know yourself.

They give back. They don’t like taking advantage of people, nor do they like the feeling of being used.

They are flexible and compromise well. Because collaborative, mature people don’t have an agenda to win at all costs, you won’t feel like you’re being taken advantage of. Compromise doesn’t mean mutual sacrifice; it means a mutual balancing of desires. They care about how you feel and don’t want to leave you feeling unsatisfied.

They’re even-tempered. They don’t sulk or pout for long periods of time or make you walk on eggshells. When angered, they will usually tell you what’s wrong and ask you to do things differently. They’re willing to take the initiative to bring conflict to a close.

They are willing to be influenced. They don’t feel threatened when other people see things differently, nor are they afraid of seeming weak if they don’t know something. They may not agree, but they’ll try to understand your point of view.

They’re truthful. They understand why you’re upset if they lie or give you a false impression.

They apologize and make amends. They want to be responsible for their own behavior and are willing to apologize when needed.

They’re responsive

Their empathy makes you feel safe. Along with self-awareness, empathy is the soul of emotional intelligence.

They make you feel seen and understood. Their behavior reflects their desire to really get to know you, rather than looking for you to mirror them. They aren’t afraid of your emotions and don’t tell you that you should be feeling some other way.

They like to comfort and be comforted. They are sympathetic and know how crucial friendly support can be.

They reflect on their actions and try to change. They clearly understand how people affect each other emotionally. They take you seriously if you tell them about a behavior of theirs that makes you uncomfortable. They’ll remain aware of the issue and demonstrate follow-through in their attempts to change.

They can laugh and be playful. Laughter is a form of egalitarian play between people and reflects an ability to relinquish control and follow someone else’s lead.

They’re enjoyable to be around. They aren’t always happy, but for the most part they seem able to generate their own good feelings and enjoy life.

someone give me validation this took forever 

7/6/19 Update: Translated into Vietnamese by the amazing @annapotterkiku

Discredit - Excerpts from A.Z. Fell and Co.’s Yelp Page 

Right now we’re in a time of open hostility and aggression. Everyone feels very divided into specific echo-chamber loyalties (sometimes for good reason, but often to fuel paranoia or discontent), and the powers that be are only stoking those fires harder because it serves them and their egos. The show’s got a much bigger emphasis on the marriage (literal and figurative) of differences and embracing friendship and basic kindness in order to bring about change. 

I’m starting to lose patience with how the purity/anti movement fails to recognise that, by definition, every adult has the lived experience of having been a teenager at some point, as opposed to just being some weird, separate class of person who exists completely beyond the Realm of Youth. Yes, there is a relevant distinction to be made between people who grew up at different times, under different cultural auspices, and how their varying experiences contributed to both their development then and their beliefs now, but at the same time, the idea that only current and/or extremely recent teenagers are qualified to talk about teenage anything is Deeply Unhelpful, not least because it means continually reinventing the discourse wheel. If your entire intellectual position is that it’s fundamentally bad or wrong for adults to socialise, morally disagree with or otherwise debate teenagers, then you’ve essentially committed to the idea that growing as a person - that growing up, even - invalidates whatever Youthful Knowledge you once possessed, while simultaneously deeming it creepy if said grown-ups continue to profess any interest in youth culture. 

A personal observation: in my tweens and teens, it felt like becoming an adult was this weird, almost brainwashy switch-flip whereby you suddenly woke up one morning and Knew You Were An Adult, as though your subconscious had downloaded a hardware upgrade during the night - and part of what enabled that belief is how little time I spent around non-family, non-teacher adults until I was one. Our society now is weirdly age-segregated, as I’ve had occasion to note before, and any kind of segregation tends to distort our perception of whichever groups we see only at a distance. I understand why there are teenagers in the world and online who think it’s weird that some adults like the same stuff they do, or enjoy stories with teenagers in them, and I also understand that creepy adults do exist - but the Venn diagram of overlap between those categories is very far from being a perfect circle.

Here’s the truth: you don’t wake up one morning and suddenly Become An Adult Forever. You just keep getting better at being yourself, day after day, which means lots of small changes over time - some of them obvious, some of them not, all happening at different rates in response to different stimuli - while your brain chemistry finds an equilibrium, or at least a relative normal, and the novelty of new autonomy is counterbalanced by the addition of new responsibilities. And at some point, you have the realisation that the Adult Switch is never going to flip: that it always was and always will be just you, forever, doing the same sort of mental and emotional self-improvement that took you from scrawled backwards letters in kindergarten to writing essays in middle school, only without a Well Done! sticker or a letter grade to reward you, and without a shared framework of educational tests and milestones to give the illusion of a universal developmental trajectory with the people you see each day, who now vary vastly in age. 

Because really, the way you develop is never universal - hell, it’s not even necessarily linear. I learned to read at three and never stopped; my husband, now a university professor, didn’t read a full book by himself until he was ten. You forget skills throughout your life and have to relearn them; some things you learn to do differently than others. Kids who grow up watching their parents fight in an unhappy marriage can know more about heartbreak at twelve than many well-adjusted adults, but the same is also true of the adult version of that kid, reaching out to someone younger who they recognise as going through the same issues. The idea that teenagers are fluid and developing, whereas adults are static and already know themselves forever, and can therefore have no non-creepy reason for talking to teens or enjoying youth culture, is wrong on every level. 

It is healthy for people to interact with people of all ages - quite literally, it connects us to our shared humanity. Those heartwarming, “surprise, this worked!” articles you see every so often, about how giving students rooms in a retirement community or putting a kindergarten in an old age home was a net boon to everyone involved shouldn’t shock us, because that’s how people are meant to live. The fact that we’ve built our current educational model around separating students by age isn’t some fundamental expression of How People Are - it’s an historical anomaly with a slew of toxic behavioural, cultural and emotional consequences. 

IMPORTANT

So the way Ao3 works? Is that the only way they can protect us from content creators and their legal teams, is to be like “hey, look, this is transformative work for fun! It earns no money!” And that’s how they get around what many authors still in this day and age think of as plagiarism and defemataion.

It’s actually in Ao3′s Terms of Services, not because they are monsters who don’t want you to thrive, but because it’s the only way to protect fan creators from the proverbial wolf at the door. I’m just old enough to remember when Anne Rice and Star Wars were going after people and filing official take downs for fan works and threatening to sue people. I know actual people who got real letters telling them to take down their fanzine or else.

Some interesting axel variations.

Top to bottom, left->right:

honestly, don’t even need that. “lol imagine if tumblr asked for monthly donations” and “you have no clear grasp of how the internet works” from the same person? considering that tumblr is owned by a giant megacorp, makes money off selling ads, and is still in the red?

ao3 has, hands down, the best and most robust tagging system out of any website I’ve ever been to. (not to mention that they very much have a moderation team, ie. tag wranglers)

On a slightly different note, imagine if AO3 acted like Tumblr did financially– no ads at first, but funded by investors who expect it to eventually turn a profit. When that doesn’t work, they they sell out to a corporation that tries to monetize the platform. First with ads and harvesting your information to sell. Then, in order to make it look nice, they scrub everything objectionable– probably, like FF.N, they’ll just blanket-ban anything above a PG-13 rating, plus– as Tumblr has done– blacklisting any “problematic tags” (for example, I can no longer tag “fandom wank” on Tumblr without my post being blocked from searches because “wank” means seeeeeeex). 

With AO3, your data is not mined or sold, so that is not a possible revenue stream. With AO3, you get a stable site despite everyone - sysadmins, coders, support staff, tech writers, human resources, tags, translators, lawyers, accountants, managers, etc. - all being unpaid volunteers. All of them.

Some of the people who work on AO3 are indeed English majors - that’s a very useful background for tech writers. The vast majority of us are trained in other areas. Because we’re a team. Of over 750 volunteers. Who donate more in volunteer time than the organization ever receives in cash.

AO3′s budget is a shoestring. Look up the Wayback Machine’s budget ($12 million in 2014) or Wikipedia’s ($81 million in 2018). AO3 is visited more often than the Wayback Machine and has almost as many works posted as English Wikipedia has articles. Yet its 2019 budget is just $515K.

This year’s server overhaul is projected to cost $177,000. We took in a whopping $230,000 for the drive, meaning that we can pay some of our other costs aside from the server overhaul. That’s good! But it’s hardly rolling it dough.

Tumblr is said to be worth 800 million or so. Give a tenth of that to AO3 so we can pay people salaries and they can work full time instead of in their spare time, and then we’ll talk.

Poland, 1981.

I’ve personally got the ideological stance that as we understand that race is a really inaccurate construct, we move away from using it. Race constructs are the meatgrinder we pour ethnicities and cultures into to get some kind of easily-digested paste. Social constructs, like race or money, are real inasmuch as they are real in their consequences, but they can be deconstructed through careful analysis.

One of my first suspicions that whiteness was kind of bullshit was learning that in the Indian Residential Schools, Indigenous Canadians got taught really specific values and held to really specific standards of hygiene and criticized for particular behaviours, and going, “WAIT A MINUTE, a few decades before, white people got yelled at for doing the exact same thing! All of the stuff they’re punishing children for are things Europeans have done for ages!”

And I’m partly thinking about my own reaction earlier in the decade to Stuff White People Like, which is about a type of North American upper-class whiteness I did not grow up in. It was so jarring to hear so many inaccurate racial stereotypes that did not apply to me! And then so eye-opening to move to Vancouver and meet 10,000 of the kind of white people the website talked about and go “OH MY GOD”. That experience really drove home, to me, the difference between the amalgamation of stereotypes, and the actual lived experience of individual people in that category. Like, I’d heard POC talking about their own experiences, and I generally knew stereotypes were pretty inacurrate–but it was so much more visceral and real when it was about me.

So I guess I’m trying to do the same kind of thing, to point out whiteness as a formerly unmarked category, a generally-held assumption of civilization and normalcy, and name it and talk about its history, so we can untangle the stupid assumption that there’s such a thing as a naturally-occurring biologically-based “white culture”, that grouping people by race, much less setting up a hierarchy, is at all a good or reasonable thing to do. 

I honestly hope lots of white people will read it and go “WILD, I am from white people who are NOTHING LIKE THIS” and then learn something about cultural stereotypes and the limitations of sociological analysis. That stereotypes come from a certain place and time and social pressure, and while they’re sometimes based on true experience of a certain subset, they’re also really bad at predicting what every single person in a group will be like.