what they don’t tell you is that the urge to just leave and start over somewhere far away only gets stronger the older you get

The most basic, intractable fact about mental illnesses is that you simply cannot willpower your way out of them. The only exceptions to this rule are the ones I have, which continue to disable me due to lack of determination and other grave personal flaws

I wish people were as scared of getting into a car accident as they are of being true crime'd. Maybe then they wouldn't be on their phones while driving.

the thing about being a contrarian (which I don't believe I am, but when I say so my friends smile knowingly and shake their heads and there's no getting out of that spike pit trap once you're in it) is that you must strive to be as contrarian (positive) as you are contrarian (negative). when you hate something instantly, you have to haul your own instincts up to the witness stand and badger them. where does your antipathy come from? is your evidence material or circumstantial? are you a reliable witness? when a friend introduces you to a friend and you see in the first split second that you were arch-nemeses in a past life, you must steel yourself and compliment their horrible shirt and listen to at least two of their jokes before you go home and pin their picture to the dartboard. this is how you work around your own prejudices, but more importantly it is also how you gather evidence that you were right in the first place and you're an astute observer of the human condition and not a contrarian just because your friends' stupid accusation is rhetorically impossible to refute. if anything they're the ones,

It's nuts how common it is to not allow children to be angry, even (especially) in households where adults are angry all the time. As a child I knew my own anger was unacceptable--not just expressing it outwardly but feeling it at all. So now as an adult my immediate reaction to my own anger is often to feel guilt instead of like. Noticing when someone is being rude or unfair or my boundaries are being violated or whatever. fucked up.