A Magpie's Hoard

What do we have in common? Art. Characters. Writing. Creativity.

I really feel like creativity is a universal glue around which people can just flock and who cares what age you are, how good you are, etc etc because we all have things to express, and we can all learn from each other.

And yes this goes both ways of the age spectrum. Of course youth can learn from the oldies, but oldies can absolutely learn from youth as well. Being 'older' doesn't make you 'better' (I say from the height of my 45 years of age). It just means you have unique perceptions that you only learn at specific ages. But youth has unique perceptions you may have lost along the way.

“Tour Guides”

As an example, a lot of groups claim to be “pro-women”, when in reality they are actually anti-trans. Their goal is not to uplift women, it’s to harass and criminalize trans people.

me: sweet hit me with the good stuff

media: so there's this marginalized underclass of people, right?

me: okay

media: and they're like, stigmatized for something that's mostly an aspect of how they are born, or where they're from, or they're badly misunderstood, right?

me: yup, got it, I'm with ya

media: so these people are rebelling against the current social order, because it's the instrument of their suffering

me: oh good great sure

media: but also they're violent and deranged and need to be stopped

me: ...what

media: yeah they're going too far, they're trying to overthrow the system and assassinate the nice cop trying to help them and also they burned down an orphanage

me: ...why? would they burn down an orphanage??

media: extremism is bad

me: still not seeing what this has to do with their fight though???

media: also now they've shot a dog. oops they shot another dog

me: what?! why? I though their motive was to overthrow oppression??

media: yes but their suffering has also made them evil

me: ...???

media: don't worry though, the good guys will defeat them and restore the status quo

me: the status quo that's been killing people?

media: well it turns out it was only killing the kinds of awful people who burn down orphanages and shoot dogs :)

me: oh. this is actually a pro-authoritarian story, isn't it?

on survival

imo way too many people are going through life thinking they're just going to be sensitive to rejection for life because of how some people (not OP, but definitely plenty of ADHD influencers) talk about this "symptom." I don't think it's terribly productive that it gets constantly cordoned off as its own thing. like a lot of ADHD, while it sucks to have it shape your life up to the point you realize what it is, it is indeed possible to exposure therapy & DBT your way out of it.

What conceptualizing RSD as a category of trauma response to social triggers does is allow us to treat it like any other trauma response. It pulls RSD out of the bioessentialist framework and into the realm of injuries that can be treated, learned associations that can be unlearned. It turns out that the same techniques that help with PTSD triggers, including the same damn meds (hi, clonidine), are effective for helping reduce RSD. (It also explains why RSD is also common in autistic people, who often have a similar history of social error and narratives of self blame, without requiring inherent neurological differences.)