norman's stuff

and not just when it comes to advertisements using 'sexy' models to try and sell you stuff, but like. in general

sex as a favor, sex as a bribe, sex in exchange for whatever

casual sex, 'friends with benefits' situations, even simple flirting

it all looks a whole lot different from the perspective of someone who's immune to manipulation via sex appeal, who has virtually no understanding as to why sex would motivate someone to cheat on their partner, etc. etc.

sex is worthless to me

i mean, it's useful as a story element in fiction, but it genuinely perplexes me that sex is such a driving force behind so many aspects of irl society & of people's individual lives, for better or for worse

and that it's so deeply ingrained into how the average person views the world & various situations, because the average person feels sexual attraction, whereas i do not

This is not talked about enough and as a result ppl struggle to process grief bc the world is telling them that grief is something else.

Grief is about loss, and IF you’d like to define it as a loss of life it is not restricted to loss of life via death. Even then I’d implore you to not view grief as about death or life but again, just loss.

Grief is also about having a shitty childhood that nothing can fix even if you have healed from it as an adult; your childhood was shitty and there’s nothing retroactively you can do about it. You grieve the loss of thriving your past self was denied.

Grief is about friendships that ended abruptly, confusingly and again, there’s nothing you can do to change that. You just have to sit with it. This is the only way grief can ultimately be processed and all it wants by the way: to be accepted and sat with. That’s it.

Grief is about opportunities that have passed, experiences you can’t have because of the way situations have ended up, and having to accept that while you do have your whole future ahead of you, there were some things you wanted to be a certain way then and they weren’t, aren’t and will never be.

Grief is being estranged from your family and missing family closeness even though you do not want to be closer to your parents, because you’re grieving the fact that there is a healthy part of human life you will not experience through them.

Grief can be the job you lost, the plans that fell through, the events that spiraled out of your control

If grief is strictly about life and death, understand that it includes grieving the life you never had and the death of who you used to be, too.

But moreover, grief is about loss.

—–

But later on, they would talk about their divorce, or their loss of jobs or trauma or other kinds of loss, and what it did to them. The grief, saying goodbye to a life you would’ve loved to have, deep sadness, anger. And I recognized so much.

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.