a disabled clown in training, and mean with it

eating disorder recovery is just getting angry over and over again because food is treated like some horrible necessary evil instead of one of the great joys of life. eat some nuts because they taste good and you are a living thing that thrives on pleasure and calories. you need both.

abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.

i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.

I think I'm going to not call it a flaw of the movie because of the context of grief and passive suicidality in the movie. I made a joke about Kara being a girlblogger because the way she encapsulates the image of the chronically online/chronically dissociated woman who holds grief and mourning as a core aspect of her personality (unwillingly, ofc. Depression is like that). Kara has several moments where she blatantly has the "I don't want to be here" level of passive suicidality. I feel like she only survives several times in the movie NOT because she's a weak woman who needs to be saved, but because she does not WANT to survive without her parents, without her home, without her dog, etc and someone ELSE needed to CHOOSE to make her live. In the scene where Lobo saved Kara, she had given up, and that is KEY to why this scene kind of works for me.

It's begrudgingly empowering from a "girlblogger core" perspective because *most sad suicidal girls are begging to be noticed and saved.* Alice Palmer from Lake Mungo spent the last months of her life BEGGING for help and knowing she had no one to save her. Ginger Snaps is an infamously doomed story. Sadako Yamamura from the Ring novels NEEDED to be taken in by someone who would protect her even if she could not comply with Japan's hegemonic society. One thing a lot of "girlboss" movies get wrong is that misogyny is not a construct of a woman's mindset but a real system of oppression that people WHO AREN'T WOMEN need to CHOOSE to act against. Women don't need saving because they are somehow alwats inherently inferior to men. Women need to be accepted, protected, and supported when they are struggling because they're people with vulnerabilities and mental health problems the same as EVERY demographic of human in existence.