#i almost want to gift them dr k's book but its geared more towards parents of minors (i think) and we're a bit beyond that

[kittykatinabag]

I wish I could remember exactly what happened to make me so avoidant to go on deep dive research tirades and write up my thoughts on stuff. It used to be a fun thing I did at one point, even if back then it was 90% the world building of various anime series, the other 10% was other Wikipedia rabbit holes I'd go down on like history or evolutionary biology or geologic records or space stuff or attempts at understanding metamaterials.

But at some point actually writing down these explorations stopped. My logical reason is that since this avoidance started either sometime in late high school or freshmen year of college, the whole plagerism lectures and absolute insistence that citing every single source and justifying every single thought in your head with evidence absolutely fucked my thought process up. But that can't be the only thing. There must have been some event or some person that affected me so much that I internalized the conclusion of "ok, anything I remotely feel, think, and especially speak about has to have some connection and evidence to it or else it doesn't count as valid"

But when I frame it in the justification way, that feeling stretches way back before I was initially doing deep dive research tirades. It stretches back to childhood and probably originates among one of the many times my parents called me a crybaby or disapproved/didn't care about something I liked because when answering the question of "why do you like [insert thing here]?" whatever answer I gave was either too vague or "wasn't a good enough reason." Or that time when I was 12 and after weeks to months of research on depression when trying to broach the topic of depression and therapy and the innate sense I had that basically boiled down to "I think I'm broken", my mom instead went on a rant about how depressed people don't exist and they just need to 'do things and talk to people' and they won't be depressed anymore.

She's a lot better about mental health stuff now but still not exactly the most receptive as I think she's never experienced it for a prolonged period of time. Which is why I still don't really divulge just how bad my own mental health was at certain points in my life.

Tangent aside, it would be nice if I could pinpoint a moment or the stretch of time when the avoidance fully started to manifest. Even when shouting into my various voids of shouting where little to no eyes see, whether it be this blog or the various spiral notebooks that I treat as a catch all for diary-ish entries, scrap paper, and other thoughts, I can't shake the feeling of not wanting to put down my thoughts. Perhaps it's like the way I explain my anxiety, the eyes in the walls feeling. Think panopticon but instead of one tower seeing everything, everything is seeing the one tower that is my physical being. I say physical being because for the most part as long as it doesn't transfer to my facial expressions or body language, I'm fine with whatever knowledge I can remember knocking about in my thoughts. Perhaps it's the observation of it all, even if the only observation is my own eyes. Something about the physicality of it makes me pause. Perhaps it makes it real, and when it's real it's a lot harder to fix if it ends up flawed.

Because god forbid anything be flawed right? /s