[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
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’!
spent some time this afternoon attempting to restart the sock project i ragequit in march, which was frankly a major triumph purely on the Overcoming Psychological Inertia front, even though in practical terms i didn't really get much forrarder?
for context: i taught myself how to knit in like january and knit one (1) thing, which was a giant neon cowl with giant yarn on giant circular needles, and then was like, ok well i have one million hats so. maybe not one of those next, even though it wld otherwise probably be logical. …sox r also basically tubes, right? which was, uh, a pretty hubristic leap in difficulty—i mean, 'tinier' isn't really conceptually more complicated, and in theory dpns are just, like, if a circular needle were segmented instead; but in practice 'tinier' is trickier and more stressful, for me at this stage in my knitting non-career anyway, and dpns are. very extremely not my friend so far.
i of course haven't been helping myself by attempting to do an italian tubular cast-on, which in fairness to me i didn't actually find prohibitively difficult to do flat when i originally tested it; but since it starts out as just, like, a series of twists that aren't actually locked in until a row or three down the line, i wasn't confident that the stitches wouldn't just unravel on me if i twisted the dpns the wrong way while attempting to get set up…
anyway i do think i learned some things today and tomorrow [or maybe more realistically friday, bc tomorrow i gotta play chauffeur] will be another day, on which i will perhaps have more success! hoping at that point to arrive at an understanding of esoterica like 'how to arrange the needles that form the tube relative to one another' (i think it shouldn't actually matter which ones top, but i sure felt today like i was Doing It Wrong, lol) and 'how the fifth needle actually interacts with the other ones in order to, you know, actually knit anything…' :)
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!