Uh-oh! You are like, SOOO awkward!!
You're so awkward that it is occasionally mildly uncomfortable for people!
You're so awkward that sometimes people are confused by you and then there are awkward silences!
You're so awkward ...... that ultimately no one is harmed!!
Oh damn!!! What a vile crime you have committed! What an unforgivable thing it is to make a fellow human briefly confused!
Why, if *I* were ever briefly confused and kind of uncomfortable as a result, I'd be devastated.... by the absolute net zero change in my happiness and health! - From which I might never recover!! Yes indeed! No punishment can ever be enough for you!!
So you better absolutely hate yourself for it.
Better be SO MEAN to yourself about every single missed social cue so you don't forget your horrible crime! Meaner than you'd ever dream of being to someone else for the same thing! This is YOUR responsibility!
You need to show the world that you KNOW you are bad by punishing yourself constantly! After all, think of all the people who BENEFIT from you punishing yourself! - No, really! Think about it! Think about who benefits from your pain.
Think of alllllll the definitely-good people that your definitely-necessary self-torment definitely helps! I mean, you can't just cut off their definitely-life-sustaining supply of your suffering, right?? Sure, everyone else has a breaking point, but you're probably the only person in human history who doesn't, right? Best not to question it probably. Sure, it's a symptom that billions of people with trauma have had, but who knows? You could be a one-in-seven-billion exception. Anything's possible!
Instead, better just accept that idea that bullies carry like guns in holsters - the idea that people who have trouble with social cues deserve to suffer. Better carry on the burden they placed on you until you drop. Aid the cause of the callous by enforcing shame and suffering upon yourself extra hard; try your best to do their work for them. They're very busy.
Better not recognize that you need patience and kindness to heal from your trauma. Better not find out that it was trauma rather than personal weakness filling your head with self-hating thoughts. Better not find out it wasn't your fault.
Better not find out that awkwardness is not inherently harmful or unkind, and, in fact, the people who act like it is *are the ones enacting harm and being cruel.*
Better not get righteously angry when you realize just how much unnecessary damage this has done to you. After all, if you get mad, you might realize you deserve better. You might even feel brave enough to DEMAND better! You might build boundaries that keep you safe! You might make other people think they deserve to feel safe too! And we obviously can't be having that, so...
Better not show yourself even a little kindness a little bit at a time.
Better not make a habit out of it after all that practice.
Better not get confident.
Especially if you can't first wipe out every trace of awkward. (And you probably never will. Because people who experience absolute social certainty at all times tend to be insufferable assholes that enforce the status quo. And you just don't have the stock portfolio for that.)
Better not be confident and awkward because then you might confuse and delight people
- you might accidentally end up making other people feel less shame for their social difficulties
- you might make isolated, traumatized, and shy people feel like they deserve to be included in social situations
- you might even make them feel they can be themselves around you
- you might start loving the effect you have on a room
- you might enjoy conversations more
- you might forgive yourself and bounce back from shame more easily and frequently
- you might come to enjoy some of those moments of harmless confusion you cause because NOBODY expects the Confident Awkward, and that can genuinely be an advantage in social situations
- you might stop apologizing so much.
- you might find that socializing is like a video game: it requires practice but also a safe space for it to be fun and positive.
Or if you can't become assertive and confident, better not remain awkward and shy and quiet, and then love and forgive yourself anyway!
Why, it would be carnage!!
In either scenario, you run the risk of finding out that it's not your fault that safe spaces full of kind people can be really hard to find, create, and nurture. You could end up building a skillset that helps you do those things if you're not careful!
If you start giving yourself even the tiniest amount of grace at a time, you will find that you've accessed a gateway drug with extreme long-term side effects:
- You might realize that it was never your fault that it took so long to like yourself.
- You might realize that you were always worth talking to, even when you didn't like yourself and communication felt impossibly difficult.
- You might realize that you'll still be worth talking to even if communication becomes harder as you age and/or experience disability.
- You might come to know that you deserve to be heard even on bad days when words come slow and blurry.
You might discover that you were always deserving of kindness, first and foremost from yourself.
So. As you can see, it's FAR too much of a risk to start granting your awkward self free pardons for your many heinous and harmless crimes. Better to just leave it there.
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Most romantic thing in the world to me actually would be if Spock went thru with kolinahr and everything went to plan and he was genuinely fine and comfortable with himself afterwards but he deeply regrets it still bc he realizes it wasn't logical to have gone through with it when he only did it to be accepted and there was nothing ever wrong with him, purging emotions isn't some superior state of being it's just a different mode of existence that is no more valuable than the former, and Jim's wellbeing is still very important to him as his t'hy'la bc mutual relationships are not the product of emotion they are a fundamentally important part of life whether u have feelings or not and Jim does have feelings and it was fucked up of him to damage them over his obsession with fitting in to Vulcan society, and a few weeks after he comes back he tells Jim he loves him softly while tryna calm him down from something and he's like no you fucking don't please dont say that to me it hurts more knowing you'd lie about it and Spock's like I'm not lying I do love you and Jim pulls himself up and looks him in the eyes like ok what does that mean and he goes I don't think it matters that I can't feel emotion anymore when I know what loving you felt like. It's in my core. If it can transcend life, actual material existence then why wouldn't it be able to transcend the emotion itself. Don't you think it's bigger than any of that. I love you because I know I do
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Hi gay people in my phone I'm thinking about how Lip has lines like "like my life isn't a complete fucking waste" and "I don't know how to be with myself" and "how am I supposed to make it?". And him struggling with the death of his friend, and him struggling with everything with Karen, and him getting raped by his girlfriend, and him getting sexually assaulted multiple times in the show. there being lines about how alcoholism isn't his problem it's the other stuff going on with him. The sudden, violent snippets we see of Lip's childhood trauma snap back up to the surface while he fails to cope with them. how he is always in the caretaking role.
just, how every time he's at his lowest, we never see his family find out about it. they don't know what Mandy did to Karen. What Mandy did to him. They don't know the insane dynamics between Lip and both his professors. Or when he got black out drunk and broke into a house. They never knew he was put in jail because they never answered his phone call. Or that time Lip was homeless and sleeping on the L. Him getting drunk and getting beat up to cope with everything. We see him barely functioning again and again and again. the show says says all of this and then goes "he needs to get out of his way 😘🫶💫" as the final parting words on his character.
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casey also talks about sepang 2015 what do you think of that
oh in that podcast? uh... lemme listen again...
yeah idk it's not really anything new I'd say? he's said basically all the same stuff in more interesting and extensive ways elsewhere. I think casey inevitably has a very 'well feuding is bad and helps nobody' point of view, has expressed that before in the past, does it here again, and he's also drawn a parallel between himself and marc on several occasions. which... well, of course there's similarities in terms of public discourse or whatever, but the parallel really falls apart whenever casey argues the feuds cost valentino. like, I do think it's sometimes important to just. keep in mind. it's interesting that casey draws this comparison in his mind but that doesn't necessarily means he's right about this. I'm not sure how you'd argue that starting a feud with casey cost valentino anything competitively? you can argue it didn't help him I guess, and then we can have a debate about the ins and outs of the 2008 season. we can also have an argument that in a hypothetical world where casey isn't ill in 2009, valentino doesn't break his leg and casey isn't on a piece of junk in 2010, and valentino isn't on a piece of junk in 2011-12, then actually maybe valentino sparking open animosity with casey COULD have cost him. but we don't know that! didn't happen! I wish we could have found out, but we never got the chance! as it stands, the tally on this is pretty straightforward: casey won the title when things were reasonably civil between them in 2007, and valentino took control of the following season at the exact moment he worsened the relationship between the pair of them in 2008. obviously, it's all more complicated than that and casey would of course argue laguna didn't negatively affect his subsequent performances... but it certainly didn't help them. like, at the very worst valentino escalating tensions in 2008 is a complete net neutral. after 2009, them being bitchy to each other every other tuesday was completely competitively irrelevant beyond maybe affecting how they approached occasionally fighting for a podium position. hey, maybe casey used that feud to fire himself up through sheer spite throughout the later stages of his career, but that doesn't actually support his anti-feud stance - it's basically the exact same thing as what valentino does. they're both quite similar in that regard! always so hungry to prove a point, to show how someone else is wrong. kinda half the point with this feuding business is to get yourself going, get yourself motivated, yeah. he straight up openly admits to using yamaha's repeat rejection of him as a way of giving himself motivation, and at the end of the day that's really not all that different?
anyway, what else does casey say... oh yeah, that him and the other aliens were already kinda prepared for this and had learned vale's tricks. that valentino had only been able to get into the minds of the previous generation. welllllll *wiggles hand* sure, I mean, he did clearly have to change his approach... he couldn't just use the exact same playbook to get to them, either on-track or off-track. but that's why he did change up the playbook... again, whether you want to believe valentino won his final two titles 'in the head' rather than just through pure pace kinda depends on how you assess the evidence, but it is at the very least a debate. and, y'know, it's always worth remembering that valentino's most important mind games with casey didn't happen in a press conference... it was on the track. and the on-track stuff really is just embedded in how valentino approaches winning. speaking of aliens, this is what dani and jorge have said:
like, valentino's entire approach to his riding, even to the way he's setting his bike up, is deliberately about directly fucking with you... he's not actually always trying to be faster than you as much as he's trying to give himself the tools to make your life miserable, to pressure you into mistakes, etc etc... and again, especially with casey (if anything because he was so mentally sturdy), the off-track stuff was really just window dressing. (I know they bicker a lot after 2009 but it's just so fundamentally irrelevant to actual on-track competition.) so you can be aware of those tricks, but it also doesn't necessarily help you when someone's being nasty to you on-track in a way you just fully do not enjoy. which is what it was like for casey! for casey, a lot of this comes back to the truly unpleasant context of how he was perceived by the public, how he was treated as mentally weak or 'broken' or whatever partly because he had the misfortune of coming up against a bloke who had the reputation for breaking rivals. I think it's quite natural to end up with a bit of a hardliner 'actually I've never been mentally affected by a result in my life' stance - and of course casey is a lot tougher than a lot of people give him credit for. that being said. sometimes your rivals affect you, shit happens, it's part of the game. it's fundamentally a nice idea to think that valentino's tactics weren't just morally wrong but also ineffective, which is kind of the appeal of this narrative, right? you want to believe you're above that, you want to believe you were adequately prepared and wise to valentino's tactic. it's unsurprising and understandable that casey does tend to tell the story that way, but again it's *wiggles hand* also hard to describe it as completely factual
uh. what else. oh I'm thrilled casey does canonically know valentino and marc were friends, he has said he wasn't following motogp too much during that time period so you couldn't be sure of that. does this mean anything? does it tell you anything? well, no, but it's just a pleasing thought to me. I like that. oh also 'provoking particularly aggressive riders isn't a good idea' is kinda a funny take from casey? like, he of all people would hate the idea of being cowed by someone's reputation like that... casey's right that provoking fast riders can potentially be dangerous, but y'know I do think that's probably not news to anyone almost nine years later. um. that's all I've got I think
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Ur tags about how Miles and Pavitr are the ones who say "I can do both" because it IS quintessential spiderman thinking AND because they're too young to have seen that devastatingly not work yet. BUT the thing is they are RIGHT but only if it's "we"! Spiderman's mythos is inherently a lonely one reinforced by Miles and Gwen's isolation and by every. single. intro. reminding us that every spider person is the "one and only spider person"! And yet!! These films are just about relationships (1/2)
YES YEAH YOU GET IT !!!! and (quite recently rewatched it and mentioning it here cause i can't believe i forgot to mention it in the post you're talking about) it really gets me that gwen also says 'i was doing both' in regards to protecting miles and protecting the canon event, and i love that the phrase was reflected like that, even tho (at this point of the movie) miles and gwen pretty much oppose each other in views/priority !!
it also absolutely kills me the way that gwen begins (like you say) atsv quitting the band and isolates herself, and then throughout the whole thing she finds something/someone that she wants to take that leap for, all over again :') she (and the entire spider-team!!) is willing to bet everything on miles and is ready to fight for him, and i really just love the idea that miles just is a force that inspires good !!!! IT REALLY IS ALL ABOUT LOVE!!!
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