Finally figured out how to put something here again

I present to you... the jates

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

My therapist (this a new one, not to be confused with the one I hit with my car) is a very straight-laced, youth pastor type guy who does not understand what I am talking about 90% of the time so honestly idk how effective he is as a therapist, but randomly he will zero in on one of my Brain Problems with complete clarity before going back to his default Straight And Neurotypical level of understanding of my general fuck-up-ery. Like I was trying to explain to him why I project so much onto certain fictional characters and why writing fanfiction about them is so cathartic for me, and I could tell I was losing him because he was having a hard time grasping the idea of just, fanfiction in general, but then he suddenly said, "it might feel safer for you to explore scary feelings with creative writing about fictional characters because you actually have control over the things you're writing, as opposed to in the real world, where you feel you have very little control over anything." And I was kind of reeling from that a little, because like, yeah, but then he said "and you use characters you like because it makes you happy to see them, like how I watch any movie that has The Rock starring in it, because it makes me happy to see The Rock." And then he just looked at me like