idk i'm tired

Victor Frankenstein after achieving the impossible and building a fucking person from scraps of the dead: Oh god, ew, ew it's ugly! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew! Ew! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew!

What helped me write trauma better is remembering that the nervous system learns predictions. If danger used to come after quiet, calm can feel threatening. If kindness used to come with a price, kindness can feel suspicious. So healing is not just “they know they’re safe now.” Healing is the slow, annoying, deeply unfair process of teaching the body that the old prediction is not always the present truth.

Fascinating how what's considered feminine and what's considered masculine can change over time. The rebranding of being a horse girl into being a stereotypical feminine girly trait needs to be studied.

Look at classic children's novels. As recently as the 50s and early 60s, being obsessed with horses as a girl was depicted as strange and tomboyish, and the very concept of being obsessed with horses from early childhood and loving toy horses and desperately wanting your own horse being a "little girl thing" and not a "little boy thing" would send someone from the 1800s and earlier into a coma.

There's maybe a point to be made here somewhere about how when keeping and riding horses stopped being necessary to the functioning of society and became a more "frivolous" thing, it was rapidly rebranded as silly and girly and for women, but what do I know.

I think strange horrible things should stop befalling my friends

I think strange wonderful things should start befalling my friends

Loss aversion is such a good stake-building tool. People often react harder to losing something than gaining something equally good, which means “she might lose the only safe place she has ever had” can hit harder than “she might win a kingdom.” Gains are exciting. Losses are personal. When a plot feels soft, ask what the character is about to lose that they have already built their identity around.

Shoutout to all the trans girls out there who were forced to live as miserable boys during the 2000’s or 2010’s, missing out on all the weird sparkledog scene rawr xd era and who are now gloriously reclaiming this time in their adulthood. All power to you. Be blessed now and forever, colorful creatures. Go outshine god.

like how every single autistic person seems to have some version of what I call the impermeable membrane which is like this sense of a veil or film or sheet of glass between you and the world. Like you can describe it to someone and they’ll be like oh yeah my impermeable membrane/sheet of glass. like people will talk about how autistics talk and move but I think a lot of autistic people have a shared visual language as well. or how autistic people have different relationships to gender the way queer people do. That gender is performed which takes agency and skill and creative choice. Even the concept that a lot of autistic people have interests that don’t match their aesthetic or aren’t limited to one subculture creates a unique type of cultural dissonance that would be a notable feature of any other artistic culture or movement. Like autism not just being something that acts upon you (as it’s described by everyone else) but something that’s expressed through you with agency and skill

The thing about Hadestown is the line “To know how it ends. And still begin to sing it again. As if it might turn out this time” is an incredible way to describe most of life. We try because we have to believe that even when the ending is set in stone, it’s still worth trying. It’s still better to be a person who tried.