Anything I feel like posting goes here

That thought isn’t helpful right now.

Now is not the time to think about it. I can think about it later.

This is irrational. I’m going to let it go.

I won’t argue with an irrational thought.

This is not an emergency. I can slow down and think clearly about what I need.

This feels threatening and urgent, but it really isn’t.

I don’t have to be perfect to be OK.

I don’t have to figure out this question. The best thing to do is just drop it.

It’s OK to make mistakes.

I already know from my past experiences that these fears are irrational.

I have to take risks in order to be free. I’m willing to take this risk.

It’s OK that I just had that thought/image, and it doesn’t mean anything. I don’t have to pay attention to it.

I’m ready to move on now.

I can handle being wrong.

I don’t have to suffer like this. I deserve to feel comfortable.

That’s not my responsibility.

That’s not my problem.

I’ve done the best I can.

Our world map today looks completely different from how it looked a thousand years ago. Nations and empires have risen and collapsed. Wars have been waged over petty bullshit that changed names and borders. Empires that were once thought invincible and perpetual crumbled to dust within a peasant's lifetime as they tilled their fields and worried about crop failure. The invention of flight, motion pictures, and the automobile chased the coattails of WWI and the great depression. Children played mischief games and elders complained about kids these days being too soft and sensitive during the fall of the Roman empire.

I think too many believe that the premodern worldview included immortal souls, and we’ve since discovered otherwise with science or reason or something. When in fact “what happens after you die” was the kind of thing reasonable people disagreed with each other about in ancient Rome. And the kind of thing they would have conversations about. Much as we do now.

And the reason that we can easily get the impression that in the past everyone believed in immortal souls was because one side of this conversation was illegal.

yes–whether they were right or wrong is besides the point, what has been erased is the controversy. Modern soul-believers claim that their view is the default one, and that materialism is some modern fad. See CS Lewis “What Christians Believe” for example.

Some people don't hate TERFs because they have a nuanced and informed understanding of the social construct of gender and gender essentialism, they just hate them because they're "too mean".

Gendered socialization is unequivocally real. Boys and girls are treated and socialized differently before they're even born.

Female babies are disappearing en masse, because male babies are more valued.

From an extremely early age, parents respond to their childrens' emotions differently based on gender. Mothers over-estimate the crawling abilities of their infant sons compared to infant daughters.

Mothers speak to their infant daughters more and talk them more about emotions than they do their sons.

By the age of 2, boys already show an avoidance to the color pink and other items traditionally seen as feminine, laying the ground work for early demonstrations of misogyny in childhood.

When children enter pre-school, there is no difference in math abilities between boys and girls. But such gaps begin to appear as children grow older.

The vast majority of girls report feeling unsafe going outside, and at least 2/3 of girls have reported experiencing sexual harassment at school by the time they 16.

Further on in education, women will understimate their scores, while men will overestimate their scores. Women will perform worse on tests when first told that women, on average, perform worse.

Researchers argue that the prevalence of sexual assault against women is so high specifically because of early gendered socialization. The men who commit sexual violence consistently demonstrate specific ideals about gender and perform hostile masculinity.

The patterns reach well into adulthood, influencing occupational choices.

I could literally go on and on and on. There are countless studies and entire fields of academia dedicated to researching this. The fact that children are socialized differently paced on assigned or percieved gender is really not debatable.

I am sympathetic to the fact that transphobes have warped the concept of socialization to insinuate that trans women are destined to be violent or predatory, or that trans men are destined to be submissive and helpless. However, people weaponizing these frameworks does not mean that the phenomenon does not exist.

Furthermore, individual people's nuanced experiences with gendered socialization does not mean that these patterns don't exist on a large scale. Any interaction with society will confer the influence of gender biases, especially upon children to are extremely vulnerable to both subtle and overt social cues.

I get asks like this every now and then, and they always contain the problem.

Your writing is not shitty. It is not worthless.

Bloggers using these terms to describe early writing are often being either glib or depressing. Ignore their advice if it is making you feel bad.

Do you write for pleasure or for praise/accomplishment? If the latter, then you are simply in the practice stage. Practice is inherently worthwhile and no effort in this regard is a waste.

If you write for pleasure, then everything you create fulfills its purpose by being entertaining to create. A small child does not drop the crayon when it realizes its drawing will never be in the MoMA, does it? No, they don't care they just like drawing stuff. Adopt that mindset. Just write to get words on the page and ideas developed because you want to.

My advice for the insecure writer:

Stop re-reading your own work; you're a very biased critic right now and that in itself is holding you back.

All improvements are for later drafts. Trust me, you'll have whole new ideas by draft three so put off the nitpicking and focus.

Avoid outside opinions, writing advice, and blogs like mine for a while; we tend to inadvertently make you feel like you've done everything wrong and need to start over.

Stop starting over. Stop deleting your early drafts. Save all of it (this was the best advice I ever received).

Read and watch books and movies for motivation, and to analyze their strengths and weaknesses.

Do. Not. Compare. Yourself. To Other. Writers—your art is about you and what concerns you, other creators have nothing to do with it.

Remind yourself dumber people are doing it wrong confidently. Copy their confidence.

When you feel self-doubt creeping in again, tell it to take a hike, you've got a story to write.

Whatever you write, no matter the quality, take pride in being a writer at all. Lazy suckers just use AI.

There's nothing wrong with making a mess. How are you supposed to learn from constant perfection? Scratch out dumb sentences, leave afterthoughts in the margins, and side tangents in brackets. If the writing isn't going well, write ROUGH DRAFT in big letters at the top to remind yourself it's just a sketch of what you had in mind, not the finished product.

"...i’m worried it can never get better" I have great news for you! This fear will only be realized if you quit. Since you feel the pull to write there's clearly no point in quitting, your brain already knows writing is the answer. Ideas don't like to wait, and life will keep trying to interrupt you with bigger things, so there's really no time like the present. Go write!

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