I have no clue what kind of blog this is. Will likely be equal parts original content, memes, existential dread, and screaming into the void. You’ll have to pry the Oxford comma out of my cold, dead hands. I’m on AO3 as ShadyCakes. she/her, they/them
lots of times if I tell my boyfriend that I am proud of him for dealing with a situation, or that I'm sorry he's having to deal with a situation, he will say "no it's my own fault." meaning that he feels like he doesn't deserve praise or comfort for dealing with a situation that is his fault. (for example a financial problem caused or exacerbated by him having been too anxious or absentminded to deal with the situation sooner.) and I tell him this and I will tell y'all this, that I don't believe that. I think you are even braver and stronger for taking steps to deal with a mess that is of or partly of your own creation, because you have to cope with guilt and shame on top of the thing itself, and because you're fighting against the same ingrained dysfunction in yourself that caused the mess. that's like the bravest and most constructive thing you can do and you should be proud and I am proud of you.
Once my friend Henry was accused of wearing wireless headphones by a substitute so she said for him to hand them over so he took them off and handed them to her. Then later on she asked him a question and he didn’t respond so she said it louder and he still didn’t respond. She asked why he was not responding and he said “I can’t understand you ma'am, you took my hearing aids.”
at some point you have to realize that you actually have to read to understand the nuance of anything. we as a society are obsessed with summarization, likely as a result of the speed demanded by capital. from headlines to social media (twitter being especially egregious with the character limit), people take in fragments of knowledge and run with them, twisting their meaning into a kaleidoscope that dilutes the message into nothing. yes, brevity is good, but sometimes the message, even when communicated with utmost brevity, requires a 300 page book. sorry.
If you know anyone who seems really chill to the point of being virtually indestructible, like nothing could ever bother them in any way, could get hit by a train and just shake it off and be totally fine, laughing it off as soon as they've dusted themselves off and stopped bleeding, but who occasionally just randomly falls apart to complete fucking smithereens with seemingly no cause nor warning, only to get back up again a few minutes/hours/days later like "ok yeah I'm fine again that was weird lmao", and you've ever wondered what the fuck is up with that:
They are actually not ok and most likely are not ok at any point. The whole "hardiest person you know who just collapses randomly sometimes" thing isn't a deliberately constructed façade, as a matter of fact it might be something that they actually personally believe themselves to be. But in reality this is somebody who's either unintentionally learned or has been deliberately trained to hide negative emotions and mask symptoms at all costs, as the #1 priority that goes over any other survival needs.
So even though it may look like they go from 1 to 100 completely at random and unpredictably, and then swing right back again to being totally fine, you have no way of knowing how long they've been at 95% before the last line of defense broke down and the system collapsed. And once they flip back up, odds are that they just managed to scrape their shit back together again just enough to get their backup masking systems running. The "check engine" light never turned on because the wire was clipped years ago.
If this is you, this is your callout to seek some sort of help. I'm telling on everyone in this room including myself.
This problem is nothing new, but this specific example with these numbers puts it into a fucking brutal perspective.
To put these numbers a different way: A Taco Bell burrito that used to cost ~7 minutes and 20 seconds of minimum wage work now costs ~30 minutes and 30 seconds of minimum wage work.
You used to be able to work at Taco Bell anywhere in the country and make enough money in one hour to buy at least 8 burritos (maybe 9 if you're a manager or something) and feed, like, 3-4 people a decently-filling meal. But now, the same amount of work at the same job will get you one meal for one person. And this change has happened over a mere 15 years.
Remember this whenever you see rich people demonize younger generations for our financial situations, when they call us irresponsible for not investing a ton of money in savings accounts.
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