[frustrated? that] i can't seem to encounter comments/attitudes that feel weirdbad* to me without feeling a need to seek reassurance that i'm being reasonable in finding them weirdbad
like yet again this is presumably a leftover artifact of the incessant messaging i got growing up that none of my re/actions were ever reasonable
but it's like. well. (a) it feels like weakness of character to me. like. why can't i just have the courage of my own convictions without needing someone else to reinforce them. (see previous para.) (b) even if we accept that this is an understandable ['if undesirable,' i immediately mentally add, but. table that question for now ig.] urge in the abstract, in practice it's like. well. my social situation lately is such that the various people towards whom i tend to direct bids of this kind will reject them at least half the time. so whether or not it's understandable: it's not viable
plus then of course it also feels like. why do i have to be SO quick to shrug off whatever the weirdbad opinion is, instead of just. sitting calmly with it for a little while. experiencing it. practicing some calm curiosity instead of agitated rejection, like that one post suggested.
unfortunately i think a lot of this stuff is like. well it's about how unsafe and insecure i feel all the time. like it's a bit idiotic to be sitting here going 'huh why am i acting so anxious when. my most crucial social bonds are as attenuated as they are and my current situation doesn't remotely lend itself to forming more.' like. obvious answer is obvious and also quite frankly i'm correct to be anxious about that!! if i were more securely socially enmeshed i could probably Practice Chillness better because these interactions would take up only the tiny fraction of my mental social map they ought to be taking up, instead of looming enormously large in a barren landscape and becoming disproportionately high-stakes as a result!
so like. diagnosing myself with shit life syndrome ig, lol
⸻ * using this as a very broad catchall term for a range of things that spans, like, 'actual bigotry' on the one end and 'someone being imo-too-flippant abt something in a way that makes me wonder if they realize i'm personally impacted by it' on the other end
Oops!... I Did It Again
genuinely wild how often i realize i’ve taken an interpersonal situation where the information i actually have is ‘i’m not having a good time’ and turned it into ‘i’m worried they’re not having a good time with me’
probably ultimately very straightforwardly traceable back to a childhood in which i wasn’t having a good time with my mother and the only variable in the situation that i actually had the power to alter was myself, so that now when as an adult i’m having a bad time with someone my instinct is still to fix myself instead of, you know, removing myself? or alternatively checking in with them about how things are feeling to them and attempting to arrive at a meeting of the minds, or at least a mutually semi-satisfactory compromise?
anyway like. this failure mode probably implies a particular menu of followup actions that i ought to be identifying and instituting, but i’d frankly settle for just ‘recognizing this particular self-abnegating reframing when i’m in the process of committing it’!
tfw you're concerned that you might have been a little gauche, but unfortunately, seeking reassurance abt it would… also be gauche…
(god my brain is just like. yowling sad! sad!! sad!!! at me incessantly today and i gotta say: it's really unhelpful???
i'm trying to do things thru it but. oof lol)
just really mourning a sense of natural secure connectedness to, well, anyone at all today/lately. and ultimately it's like, well, lord knows people haven't felt connected to you in the past, kiddo, so very arguably you're just reaping what you've sown… and in any event maybe the entire notion of 'natural' is as overrated in a social context as it is in food/gender/&c contexts, and i just need to accept that the path forward involves a lot of awkward attempts at (re)connection, and that it's unavoidably going to be a very unhappy road for me because of how miserable any interaction that isn't Overtly! Positive! immediately makes me feel, because [RSD/chronic post–social rejection stress disorder/however you like to frame the Sudden Disproportionate Flood of Misery phenomenon].
it's just hard because usually the slow, laborious, only-intermittently-rewarded slog is how it works at, like, the edges of your comfort zone, you know? but unfortunately my entire social comfort zone has turned into edges, even the loadbearing bits, and whether or not that's entirely ""my"" ""fault"" (often not a particularly good way to look at two-way social streets in any event: self-righteous isolation isn't gonna keep you warm!), it's unquestionably going to require some active effort from me to improve. just, you know, the eternal cruel irony that things so often require more work precisely when you're already operating at a deficit…
just having one of those little upswell-of-gender-despair moments, you know how it is
specifically of the nonbinary variety where like. you know you don't really like how you look¹ or how other people react to you but the Opposite Version wouldn't really be better, really you want something in-between or ambiguous or nothing at all but that isn't actually a real option you get to have in real life, in real life you either get to be a mannish woman whose real gender desires are a painful secret or you get to become Pronoun Pin Guy and then are still effectively seen [and treated!] as a mannish woman, just, you know, a crazy, annoying one
i mean obviously part of the problem here is that i don't really have nonbinary/agender/&c people in my life, i'm super isolated and then even my internet circles have historically been comprised of like. trans people μέν who care about medical transition but not about the language other people use for them (which to be clear is perfectly valid but like. unfortunately my maybe-deepest identity is 'poet (non-practicing)' and i care so much about language. [i may or may not also care abt (some aspects of) medical transition but like. i don't atm have any health insurance or income and also due to the ongoing cptsd frozen-rabbit psychological situation it's a bit hard to tell what ""i"" might ""want"" so. question mark there]). cis+ people δέ who basically are like 'well the real practical, adult approach is just to accept that one's Basically Materially Cis unless one's strongly motivated to medically transition, but, like, your special-snowflake baby sensitivities are Valid or whatever…'² which, again, you have to let people frame things for themselves and pretend it doesn't imply anything abt you, because if nothing else, your differences of inclination wrt how to frame things make your situations different! but unfortunately, even though i do genuinely intellectually believe that, emotionally it hurts my feelings every time, because i really resent this idea that like. cis is the box everyone starts in + stays in unless they kick hard enough to get out of it. bodies shouldn't mean anything by default!!
⸻ ¹ i think this gets worse every time the season changes and i have to re-figure out how to walk the extremely narrow sartorial line i can actually bear, is part of what's going on here ² to be clear and fair to the people in question the level of superiority i've portrayed here is entirely my projection onto them, it's not on them that this stance makes me feel this way, it just does :/
the problem with being fair-minded is that when something is hurting your feelings but it's something you've previously done yourself you kind of just have to be like. welp.
one of my more unhelpful qualities is that i kind of genuinely prefer getting zero response to a ~bid for connection~ over getting one that feels, like, dutiful and abbreviated and rote
because like. at least in the absence of a response you can kid yourself that a matching enthusiasm will eventually arrive, you know?
(this is of course very much a lesser-of-two-weevils thought exercise because of course really what one always wants is engagement that's both enthusiastic and prompt. however one must recognize that in the adult world Other People Have Lives, &c.)
it also doesn't help that like. i'm very primed Due To My Upbringing to interpret neutral cues as negative and so am very much that stereotype of the young person who wants an exclamation point and can't stand a 'sure,' which—is objectively just a neutral cultural preference, but since i'm not actually gen z or whatever, i always end up excoriating myself for being too much of an immature baby to be appropriately chill about other people's Offhanded Working Person stylings. which is rather a disproportionate pile of bad feelings to be stacking on one maybe-not-even-intentionally snubbed bid!
i was like well i could ""compose a post"" or i could just. mine the way i explained this in chat the other day for parts—
anyway all this [trying to work out a congenial set of blogs to follow] has me thinking back to when i made a friend in my german reading class and was like 'oh right actually sometimes you meet people and it immediately feels good and easy and safe and fun. forgot that was how it was supposed to work!' bc unfortunately the reality is that as a now–chronically isolated misfit i'm strongly motivated to try and convince myself i could like people even when. we aren't actually compatible.
bc the thing is, it turns out that not feeling like you're part of either mainstream gender club is: really fucking lonely! bc you just feel constantly like. wow insane gender coercion is happening all around me constantly and it makes me angry and scared and i don’t know how not to vent incredulously about it but i'm also acutely aware that becoming someone who can't shut up abt their gender alienation is a great way to come off as a bore and (pun not intended) a drag…
not to mention that like. people are basically only nice to me when they girlbox me so like. i need it and hate it and feel guilty abt it!
i do wish my experience of having feelings (this isn't me being Vague, i do very generically mean 'having literally any feelings at all about anything ever') didn't automatically involve a meta-layer of feeling viscerally humiliated by the fact of my having them
like any time i get irritated or upset about anything it almost immediately tips into 'well okay but probably i'm the problem here bc i'm Oversensitive and Irritable bc i've failed to construct a life for myself which makes me happy in a way that would cushion me against being bothered by these irritants, which in the philosophical scheme of things i recognize i should Rise Above' (in this framing i am apparently an oyster and happiness = nacre). and it's not that there's no potential truth to this line of thinking but it also feels a little like i imagine having one's emotions blamed on one's menstrual cycle would feel (disrespectful & humiliating)
with things like sadness-about-everything-and-nothing-in-particular or, idk, private delusional romantic hopefulness abt people (nothing recent in this category but i have been known to experience it from time to time) it's slightly different bc there the meta-feeling is less about my failure to respond appropriately to other people and more about, like, why am i not advanced enough to have evolved beyond these feelings. like 'i understand intellectually how unfounded and ultimately laughable i look right now and yet. despite my ability to observe myself i still continue to experience this (unpleasant, humiliating) experience. why can i not think my way out of it.' and of course this is more or less equivalent to saying 'why can't i think my way out of the human condition' which. hello. and yet!!
anyway i think none of this is helped by the fact that my nearest and dearest are largely deeply phlegmatic, pragmatic people, at least in terms of the affect they present to me, and so by comparison i feel deeply histrionic and stupid and childish at essentially all times: Local Man Secretly Dancing Bear (unlike aubreyad where dancing bear secretly man). the answer is presumably 'don't compare yourself! you are a different variety of Creature! #IDIC!' but unfortunately the comparative impulse is i think. again. pretty deeply human (for feelings on which, see above)…