Racing Turtles

the stupidest thing about mental illness is the short half life of reassurances. like yes I know you reminded me yesterday that I'm not secretly toxic waste that everybody wants rid of but that was like 18 hours ago and I forgor

I was talking with my therapist about this post this morning, and she helped me realize that just seeing this post is helping me manage this unwanted thought pattern.

When I think back to my youth, and about how the group I hung out with as a teenager felt to me like they mostly kept me around as the butt of the joke, as someone to make fun of, it's easy for me to assume that that formative social interaction a) actually happened the way I remember it, and b) provided an experiential basis for a belief that I'm "secretly toxic waste that everybody wants rid of".

But seeing this post -- and seeing that tens of thousands of people have agreed with the sentiment -- has led me to the realization (which my therapist agrees with) that this is just a common thought pattern among people with social trauma. And if it's a common post-traumatic thought pattern, then I don't have to accept that it's true; it is extremely unlikely that we are all secretly toxic waste and that nobody really wants us around (in fact, it's far more likely that that's not true of any of us). And that gives me grounds* to look twice at that thought pattern and discard it when it comes up.

* It doesn't always work, but at least now I have a better chance.

I like how people on tumblr/twitters examples of irredeemable media are always coincidentally media that had been highly popular online 5 years prior and would, say, potentially be something a young adult might be embarrassed about having liked as a teenager at one point

#same as it ever was(via @xaveria)

I think that when we tell teenagers that their lives will be over if they don't have the most perfect possible trajectory through the education system, that this is, perhaps, if I may be bold, not good for them,

this is one is important as fuck i see so many people not understand this and it drives me crazy

"Sburb ruins, mythic challenges, and personal quests generally tend to come off as shallow busywork, stage props, or set pieces in a spurious Hero's Journey. Rose either faintly glimpses this truth at this early stage, or she's just hitting her rebellious teen stride. Either way, she doesn't take the surface value of the quest seriously at all, and only wants to smash it apart and loot the secrets. My sense is that the average reader reacts to this impulse unfavorably. Because readers watch the formula play out so often, they are trained heavily to respect the journey of the hero, to anticipate and crave its fulfillment, to see it as something verging on contractual in their relationship with a story. So a gut-response to this recklessness is like, "ROSE, NO! STOP THAT! You simply must complete your quest and play the rain!" What comes with this view is the feeling that her evolution as a character is only being delayed for a bit while she gets some anti-narrative foolishness out of her system, and then we'll get down to business and watch her do her quest, play a whole BUNCH of rain, and reap the narrative satisfaction. There's just one problem: she never does that. This candy-coated Kiddie Kwest is at no point ever taken seriously by Rose or the narrative itself, nor should it be.

When trying to parse character arcs, we look out for certain beacons. So when we hear "play the rain," we're like, ah, GOT IT. That's Rose's arc. Once she finally gets over this destructive teen bullshit, she can wise up, play the rain, and her arc will be finished. Wrong. This is almost a red herring arc. Her quest on this planet, its patronizing presentation, its intrinsic shallowness, is a mirage surrounding her that represents a fully regimented series of milestones for achievement and personal growth, much as society dubiously presents to young people in many forms. The true arc-within-the-arc is actually an upside-down version of what it appears to be. What Rose is doing now, which seems to be misguided recklessness taking her further away from the truth of herself, is actually better seen as a good start to her real journey: breaching the mirage of regimented growth, exposing it for the charade it is, and pulling the truth out of it. The real conflict in her arc comes not from the fact that she refuses to take it seriously, by destroying it and taking shortcuts. It's the opposite. It's that, upon trashing her planet, she continues to have this nagging sense that she should be taking this quest seriously, much like how a young adult may have a nagging sense of guilt that they aren't "being an adult right" by the time they approach adulthood. And this nagging, unanswerable guilt arises from the truth that the regimentation of adulthood is completely fake. It was always a mirage. Learning this, making peace with it, is part of the growing process for many, and it is for her too." -Andrew Hussie

intrinsically queer as fuck, too, btw

god it drove me absolutely NUTS to watch people assume grimdark!rose was a Fallen Woman whose destructive power was gruesomely evil and whose goals had been totally suborned by cosmic puppetmasters. because homestuck, famously, played every single trope as straight as an arrow.

just, fandom at large assumed this grimdark->evil thing so hard that they completely ignored everything that actually happened which was that she was totally fine and got some pretty useful stuff accomplished.

we're so trained to take male autonomy for granted, and to expect female characters to only ever act in service to higher powers, that the extremely obvious inversion of the badass striders being tortured puppets bound up in the poisonous chains of compulsory masculinity went over a LOT of heads. and the fact that rose knew what she was doing AND she was right AND she was *a good kid who helped as many people as she could, whenever she could* was a nearly indigestible pill to swallow.

i think it’s funny when someone acts really angry about something you say online. could be whatever. and you check their profile and go. oh wait. you’re literally 14. nevermind. talking about this with you is like 100% useless. and they go “my age has nothing to do with this” like actually your age has everything to do with this. when you are 14 literally everything is influenced by how fucking 14 years old you are.

[ID: a reply by the user drs3ex: “unfortunately saying this to a 14 year old would only make them act more 14 about it (source: i was 14)”]

Somebody mentioned in a tag on one of my posts the scene where Marco Animorphs is showering after antmageddon and he finds an ant stuck to his hip by the pincers where it presumably was trying to bite him in half when he was an ant and then it died from him becoming very big very fast and I feel like that scene, and the scene where Cassie finds a sliver of a sentient person’s flesh between her teeth while she’s flossing and then flosses until her gums bleed, really deserve recognition in the literary canon. Applegate deserves an award. There should be a TV Trope named after whatever the fuck that is. Like fridge horror but diegetic. Bathroom horror. Your bedtime bathroom routine as an opportunity for personal confrontation with the violent detritus of the dead which lingers in and on your body even after you have ostensibly stripped yourself of weapons and healed over all your wounds.

Applegate said I know that the adolescent experience involves a lot of being alone in a room with your body (often but not always the bathroom) and becoming aware of something incredibly alarming and, hear me out, what if that thing was either uncontrollable weirdly gruesome bodily metamorphosis or  physical fragments of things and people you’ve killed. And whoever she was in a pitch meeting with said sorry lady I wasn’t listening to you but you can just put whatever you want in these books, no one cares as long as you meet deadline

Ya'll read this thread ! It's not something I have actively thought about but I think they make a great point here.

This is very interesting!

Rebloging for awareness.

adding the rest of the thread because WOW. if that isn't it tho

are men okay?

NO

my husband told me, after many years of being together, that when he was about 7 a teacher used to single him out for being disrespectful at school. Apparently his disrespectful offense was “smirking” too much???? So he got punished for smiling???? And eventually just trained himself to stop smiling so this teacher would leave him alone???? And that’s why he has such a stoic facial expression now and can’t smile for photographs.

I had to.....privately cry after hearing that one

Wow

It’s the only way men are able to discuss their issues because society taught them that they shouldn’t burden people with their issues or that their issues are meaningless or that their issues aren’t actually a thing. Sharing anecdotes with friends is one way of talking about it, because they feel comfortable enough to share. At the same time, they might just not know that the event was traumatic because it’s trauma y’all.

im-

Take this to be your reminder that men experience trauma too and need a safe space to talk about it. Be that safe space for your friends who are men

less romanticizing high school more media about how being 17 is the worst human experience imaginable

(via @arrows-for-pens​)

13: i am twisted i am deranged i am satan incarnate

19: wow 13 year old me was going through it lmao. im actually fine and normal

23: i am twisted i am deranged i am satan incarnate

I . . . I need a moment.

“’Well, I guess it had to happen sooner or later. You’ve turned into a real teenager. Mom’s too out of it to talk to.’

She didn’t say it in a mean way. More like a joke.

I made a smile for her. ‘That must be it,’ I said. ‘It must be that whole teenage thing.’

She shrugged. ‘You know, when I was your age and feeling upset, my mother, your gram, would always just say, “You don’t know what unhappy is, you’re just a kid.” Like anything a kid would feel would be less difficult or painful than what an adult would feel.’

'That’s probably true,’ I said, not really listening.

'No, it isn’t,’ my mother said firmly. 'In a lot of ways being a kid is worse than being an adult. You have the same things to deal with: friends, temptations, love and hate, and all that. Only you don’t have the two great weapons that adults have to help them.’

I cocked an eye at her. 'What two great weapons?’

'Well, the first is experience. Experience maybe doesn’t make you smarter, but it means you can think, “Hey, I had something like this happen once before, and I survived.”’

'Okay, I’ll ask: What’s the second great weapon?’

She looked right at me. 'You are, Jake. Because as your mom, I can look at you and think, “Oh, man, as bad as I feel right now, as bad as things may be, at least it isn’t as bad as being a teenager.”’”

- Book #16: The Warning (Jake), pg. 141 (by K.A. Applegate)

they got into a fight with asriel 

I still really like this piece cuz no one can tell if this was supposed to be sad or funny and the answer is yes.