holy ghost, i'm on fire

You cannot live alone on the fantasies you feed to your mind, eventually you have to touch your life for real, assess and analyze your habits, understand your character, try not to hate yourself for your character as it was shaped when you were very young by circumstances outside of you, and begin learning how to cope with your character, how to build habits that work for you, finish small projects, finish big projects, expose yourself to more uncomfortable situations, assess why you want to leave that friendship before you leave it, raise your anxiety levels on purpose, so that you can grow, raise your work load on purpose, so that you can grow, so that you can build resilience, so that your life expands, and can be experienced by you in full and in reality

duuuuuude you have GOT to come out tonight we're enacting cruelty upon those who have transgressed so badly that we can justify any act against them... and you KNOW we're interpreting our delight as moral righteousness... Yeah it's fucking crazyyyyyyy get an Uber

sometime's you'll be reading the wikipedia article for Marshton's Ant and halfway down the page you'll see "marshton's ant is omniscient and very small[1]" and you'll go what the fuck so you click omniscient and be redirected to a page called Omniscience (ant biology) that tells you "in ant biology, an ant is considered omniscient if it knows what its own ass looks like" and you're like oh okay and the disappointment follows you for the rest of the day

hey sorry I snapped at you, I've just had a really hard day and [remembers focusing on myself is selfish] maybe it's your fault for provoking me?

not using AI genuinely feels like the rest of the world is experiencing some kind of mass amnesia. if someone says they never use it, the immediate response is that can't be true because "everyone" uses it to write their emails or answer their questions. saw a comment suggesting that not using chatgpt to write an essay is "like the 90s". girl I graduated in 2021 and we weren't doing that! how is it that everyone has suddenly forgotten that they were entirely capable of doing these things all by themselves for their entire lives up until the past few years!! am I going crazy!!!

my first year of high school i was in this intensive outpatient exposure therapy program which i attended for the first half of every other weekday, or something. it was in this out-of-the-way room in some sort of hospital; the memories flicker a bit because i've been in a lot of rooms with buzzy fluorescent lights and adults who talk to me like a dog, so they sort of blur together. there are a few things that distinguish my time in iop, though, and one of those is the little boy on the other side of the room, with a different small group of kids and therapists, who screamed endlessly. he couldn't have been much older than eleven. he would come in every day a bit after me and start screaming and i would put my head down on the table between my arms, trying to cover my ears. i never heard him say a word. there was a tiny empty room they sent him to, but it wasn't actually soundproof, just a little further away, so everything we did at the program was accompanied by the background score of a little boy screaming in another room. at the time i found it only a bit more annoying than the slight buzzing of the fluorescent lights, because none of the adults gave any indication that something was wrong here, and all of us kids were crazy anyway. i graduated the summer before my sophomore year, and he was still there when i left. i don't remember his name or what he looked like, and it's not like i could reach back and save him if i did.

i keep wanting to reframe this act as some kind of tiny liberation, but that's a lie, and not a permissible lie like the lies that slip into everything i write from memory no matter how objective i pretend to be. it's the worst kind of lie! it's theft! i spent some time in that room, too, when i became too unwieldy, but i can't cut and fold my memory over him and place the screams in my throat. i can't know why he screamed. i know that i could have, and i think that i probably should have, and i know that i didn't. i spent the first part of my childhood screaming, and then i spent a lot of time in rooms with buzzy fluorescent lights and adults who talked to me like a dog, and i became the only person i can tell this story as: the girl on the other side of the room who listened to him scream and didn't wonder about it at all.

joining the war on kids reading any book they want on the side of kids reading any book they want. simply you will be fine. it's even good to be confronted with things you don't understand and even find upsetting, uncomfortable and difficult. it's a surprise tool that will help you later.

And this is a perfect illustration of why it is important for kids to read or variety of things, and why abusers don’t want them to.

Hiding knowledge from kids will not benefit them but only render them helpless when faced with the unknown