#i leave the internet for five goddamn minutes and you whippersnappers have come up with new words

[your-actual-therapist]

tumblr legalese (or, why it's safer to keep an emotional support dark lord around for emergencies)

sometimes i feel like i have to add legal disclaimers to the things i write on the internet, like those "may experience sudden diarrhea or pet death" disclaimers they have at the end of drug ads. mine would read, "not responsible for not anticipating all the ways you'll deliberately misinterpret and fuck up my advice, thus proving me a villain."

i feel this way because people are so good at playing that weird game where they take something you wrote and put it in the worst possible context to make you sound like an irredeemably terrible person.

feel a mote of self-esteem? only narcissists feel that way, and narcissists have abused me, and therefore you're abusing me now.

eat when you're hungry? some people can't eat and have to be tube-fed. your privilege is showing.

self-compassion? what if there's a bear near you? how can someone have self-compassion when they're being attacked by BEARS. priorities. smh.

trans women are beautiful? AM I, A CISGENDER PERSON WITH A SKIN AS THIN AS WET TOILET PAPER, NOT BEAUTIFUL?!?!

and as you can imagine i'm like:

i'm not relating any of this to "cancel culture" or "snowflakeism" or whatever other buzzword fascists are using to characterize actual harm as valid opinion. i think the truth is weirder.

rules, fear, and extremes

the expectations tumblr-adjacent people have for themselves and others are extreme. they are extreme in the sense that they have taken sensible statements like "be aware of others' feelings" or "remember that not everyone shares your experiences" and turned these reasonable views into unrecognizable, rigid, toxically exaggerated rules.

as a therapist, i have noticed that this tends to happen to people who have done a lot of therapy or self-reflection and continue to struggle with uncertainty. the therapist or self-help book says "have boundaries" or "take responsibility" and they're like, "i like this concept, but i don't want to make any judgment calls about it. my judgment could be wrong. being wrong would be catastrophic. i need solid, unambiguous rules for every situation."

so they morph that advice into something ridiculous. "have boundaries" becomes "have indiscriminately rigid boundaries," and "take responsibility" becomes "take responsibility for everything that results from your behavior, even stuff that you couldn't have anticipated." the only 100% safe situation, if you're not okay making mistakes and being wrong, is one where the rules are inflexible and taken to their logical extreme.

want to write a fanfic featuring a romantic relationship between two characters who are teenagers? you're an evil pedophile.

you think some foods have different nutritional properties than other foods and that people need more than just cheez-its and coffee for their bodies to work? obviously you're a diet fiend and encouraging anorexia.

you're neurodivergent and you're not always 100% jazzed about the challenges your neurodivergence brings to your life? ableist.

cosmic uncertainty and the allure of safety

these "rules" may sound silly, but they're also safe. without rigid rules, you're forced to take risks. you have to use your brain and assess the situation, and you could be wrong. you may then have to admit to other people that you were wrong and engage with them to learn to do better. you may not ever know whether you made the right call.

on a cosmic level, that gets scary.

because what if you can't ever know whether you're doing the right thing? what if you're going to be uncertain about the important things in your life forever? what if it's not possible to be certain? what if your perceptions and judgments are fallible? what if you're alone in your brain and no one can ever reach in there and be like, "that's what you meant"?

behind every inflexible rule is a deep well of fear. you see it in incel communities, where they've spilled millions of gallons of E-Ink© trying to make sense of their world by explaining sexual success by millimeters of difference in eye position. you see it in dogmatic expressions of religion, which can't allow for human fallibility or subtle shades of gray because if they did, their followers would have to risk being uncertain about something. you see it in those baffling self-help articles that turn self-evident statements like "be mindful of your time and energy" into dramatic extremes like "it's always okay to cancel on people at the last minute 'cause, y'know, self-care!"

enter the villain

so—back to tumblr legalese. my hunch is that it feels satisfying to call someone out based on a rule you believe in, even if that rule is profoundly weird and doesn't take human nuances into account. it's satisfying because it allows you to have a villain.

villains are simple. you don't have to think about whether darth vader or nurse ratched are bad people, and you don't have to waste time untangling your own motives for opposing them. there is no moral ambivalence or cosmic uncertainty. you don't even have to defeat a villain to feel good. it's enough just to know you're fighting the good fight, and that as long as you do that, your life is not meaningless. maybe you haven't defeated the villain, but you know what you have defeated? anxiety.

without a villain, you're left to your own fragile human abilities. what's scarier than pennywise? meaninglessness. uncertainty. being alone in your own brain.

i will leave you with the words of the existential psychotherapist ernest becker, who summed it up in one of my favorite books, the denial of death, much better than my terribly congested, snot-filled self can right now:

Beyond ourselves we sense chaos. We can’t really do much about this unbelievable power, except for one thing: we can endow certain persons with it. The child takes natural awe and terror and focuses them on individual beings, which allows him to find the power and the horror all in one place instead of diffused throughout a chaotic universe. Mirabile! The transference object, being endowed with the transcendent powers of the universe, now has in himself the power to control, order, and combat them.