I feel like a dog chasing it’s own tail in the sense that I am tired

I know my brain is broken and my body is blue-screening, and I know that I made every good, bad, and ugly choice that got me to where I am today,

but I sometimes think that if a fraction of the people I care about would expend a fraction of the energy I do towards the legwork of our connection and relationship, it would ease a lot.

like do they have to do it all, or meet where I'm at? No, and i doubt most people would if they could.

but could they do more? almost always. Could they do any? sometimes. and some of them do! I do see it when they do!

when you are a cup that is overflowing from the top and leaking out cracks in the sides, sometimes, it would help if someone would start bailing you out a little, or holding you to slow the leaks.

I have been too much and not enough my entire life, always too much enthusiasm and unfocused or hyperfocused energy that eventually gets squashed and then I am too much negativity and sadness that eventually gets shamed or becomes annoying or is a bummer, and even though I try to put 110% into every relationship when I can, it is so rarely reciprocated to even a glass half full.

I get thirsty, and I drink it empty, because what's filling me and overflowing isn't water, it's a void that sucks in as much as it crushes and eventually spits out. It is true in many ways that those of us not given the love we are told we are getting or supposed to get as children crave attention, but more than anything we crave not having to love ourselves on our own.

If we have to keep trying to love ourselves on our own - to have to schedule every social engagement or intimate moment and remind people of every event because no one else prioritizes those things, to have to educate everyone we love on how to love and how to express love in ways that are safe and helpful and fulfilling, to do the work to build relationships and maintain them and communicate every step of the way, to meet everyone's needs and respect everyone's boundaries no matter how much those boundaries & needs infringe upon our own needs and boundaries, to make up for the times people let us down and fail us and bail on us, to have the silence waiting for other people to pick up the conversation after promises that we would not have to wait so long and claims that we matter to them -

if we have to keep trying to love ourselves on our own, when we were never given reasons to love ourselves, we were not shown what it was like to love ourselves and find inherent value in ourselves, when we know that any day we are not operating at 110%, we risk spilling our cup with no one else willing to refill it, and we may never drink from many cups again.

I know I am a void, endlessly hungry and thirsty, destructive if I am not at my best, but that does not mean no one should feed or water me, that does not mean my cup should be cracked and broken. I did not make me this way alone, and every day I slice my fingers on a new crack in my facade, more of the void spills out.

I would give anything to feel like I am not just spilling over endlessly with something I can't use to nourish myself, and to feel like community is an actually real thing, and that relationships could be balanced, not 50/50 all the time but instead filling cups that aren't full, and balancing out the load when too much pours out.

I can't be enough. Too much or too little, and never able to find that sweet spot, because alone and without others reciprocating my efforts, I am just a broken cup.

y’all ever just have, like, friend levels? Like primary, secondary, tertiary, that’s how I imagine it, like a friend pyramid

but then if this is off food pyramid metaphors, I thought, does this mean that the secondary friend has to eat the primary friend? Are there friend decomposers that feed off the dead friends and give their energy back to me? Does this make me the producer? Do my close friends feed off my life force? Are they aliens or something? What is the sun in this metaphor? Are there apex predator friends? What would that even mean?

then again there’s also the color wheel, and that goes off that vocabulary too. Are my secondary friends just a mixture of two of my primary friends? Are they the children? In this metaphor are my friends creating offspring? If I have a primary friend named Dee and a secondary friend named Niel, then is their child—my tertiary friend—named Dee-Neil? Is there a color theory, but like a friend theory, where some friends mesh well with each other and like half of them are warm and half are cold? That does track.

so yeah that’s what I’ve been thinking about what did you guys do today

(teaching my art class)

me: and what’s the number one rule when designing characters with wings? …well?

a handful of students, sighing reluctantly: no good fa-

me (interrupting them): NO good-faith attempts at realism, EVER. you want all the bird dweebs and physicists jumping ship as EARLY AS POSSIBLE so they’re not around to cinemasins your ass when you get to the cool parts of your story, and…ugh, what now, gerald

gerald (my least favorite student): why not just do some minimal research instead of-

me: listen you little shit i can and will singlehandedly tank your 4.0 gpa

why do numerous things go wrong at once? Why can they not space themselves out?

My mental health is aaa old, stretched out trampoline and if one more thing goes wrong, it will rip and everything will fall into the void.

I assume the wallet enjoys crushing kids and catching on fire

Tumblr is like a video rental store:

You can put out a post and nobody notices it in that moment, a few mutuals probably will share it so there's a thin scattering across several blogs, but for the most part is dormant... then a few years of people gently browsing blogs and the post defusing over months and years, gaining notes, until it's a 10k+ kind of post!

Or someone says something like "Cats love chatting about their humans with one another" and that instantly resonates and the video store metaphor falls apart!

Thank you for suffering through this post!

Social anxiety is great because I somehow manage to turn every conversation into a field of rakes that I then step on like willy coyote, which then chains into me stepping on more and more rakes as I try to fix the first one, which might have not even been real in the first place, but I'll never know

Vanny’s story in FNAF help wanted summed up

Have an old meditation of mine on dread. It's still relevant, honestly. And I've been handling this dread since like ... 2016? Interesting to think with, but life would be so much nicer without this beast on my back...

Dark Fountains Causing the Apocalypse? ❌😒

Dark Fountains as a Metaphor for Global Warming? ✅👏

"but i’ve kissed your mouth, that corner, that place it goes, so many times now. i’ve memorized it. topography on the map of you, a world i’m still charting."

gideon nav loves like a dog who grew up with nothing but a chain around her neck and a bowl of dirty water and that knows that the hand that feeds her is the very same hand that beats her but she still can't help but wag her tail a little when she sees her owner approach

...i've kissed your mouth, that corner, that place it goes, so many times now. i've memorized it. topography on the map of you, a world i'm still charting. i know it. i added it to the key. here: inches to miles. i can multiply it out, read your latitude and longitude. recite your coordinates like la rosaria.

On Voting in America

So one of the most profound comments on routine chores that I've ever encountered was, hilariously, the Pickle Rick episode of "Rick & Morty," where (after a lot of shenanigans have already ensued) this therapist absolutely lays Rick out:

"I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I'm bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is: it's not an adventure. There's no way to do it so wrong you might die. It's just work. And the bottom line is some people are okay going to work and some people, well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."

I think about this at least once a week — usually while I'm doing my laundry or sweeping or some other task that needs doing and won't get me anything more than clean clothing or a dog-hair-free floor. There's no Pulitzer for wiping down your microwave or scrubbing your toilet; no one's awarding you for getting all the dishes out of the sink. At best you have the satisfaction of crossing it off your list.

Voting is very much the same (and I'm talking about the US here, as an American). Sure, you sometimes get a sticker; but nobody's going to cheer for you. There's no adventure here, no potential for anything more than crossing something off of a list. It's a chore, something that needs doing in order to repair, maintain, and yes even clean. So I get why people don't like doing it.

And I've decided I don't give a shit.

Do it anyway. Your country takes astonishingly little from you — taxes, the once-in-a-blue-moon jury duty, and a theoretical draft that hasn't been used in over half a century and likely will never be again — but it asks you (asks! not requires! not demands!) to vote once a year. It's not always easy; especially in conservative states, the impediments to vote can be ridiculous. But it is once a year and unlike in our nation's all-too-recent past, you will not die if you do it.

In fact, the worst outcome from voting these days is that the person or issue that you vote for loses — but you won't know if they lose until after the election. Polls are less accurate now, for a whole host of reasons; you cannot know until after the election who or what will win. This makes your vote more valuable than possibly ever before.

Use that power. Not because it's exciting or even rewarding, but because your vote is what keeps our country's metaphorical teeth from falling out and our metaphorical ass from stinking.

Brush, wipe, vote.