#mostly i want to point out that tangle’s characterization HAS objectively changed whether you like one or the other more

[leori-the-unlearned]

rereading IDW sonic is giving me a better picture of just how skewed tangle’s recent characterization is :(

i know continuity marches on and all but man. tangle is the only one getting THIS bent out of shape all the time and it sucks. she’s the everyman (she really shouldn’t be) and keeps getting mistaken for a different character trope by each new arc’s writers

[csolarstormhealthjournal]

"I don't think I can just blow this off Morty.  If I had known it worked this way, I wouldn't have detoxed.  Well, "I" would have because I was toxic.  Now I'm detoxed and I'm accountable to my toxins, right?  It's a dilemma."

This quote is what made me gush about tonight's episode of Rick and Morty, and I have to go into long detail about my experiences in order to explain - to myself, primarily - why it spoke to me.

Well, first of all, I don't like the idea of calling people "toxic", most directly because my old best friend framed my behavior that way back in 2009.  Obviously my point of view was, and most people corroborate this, that there was no malice or intent behind my "toxicity", but that I was stuck in a terrible situation where I was suffering, in pain, and often trapped in a hospital, and kept almost dying before I could recover from the previous “almost dying”.  I also had a pretty transparent post-traumatic episode where I told her that I was scared to go back to the hospital, and then when she told me to think positive, I snapped at her and basically said “bullshit”, that I needed to feel negatively.  She didn’t deserve that, and didn’t accept it, but it was what I was going through.  We went through this cycle again when I called her asking for emotional support when the doctors accidentally mixed my seizure medicines.

Basically, the way in which I was toxic, or abusive, was just based on how my behavior affected her, and not a full objective characterization of what was going on, because I was stuck in a situation far beyond my control.  (But she wasn’t.  She could choose to remove herself, and did.)  And I definitely reflect on this a lot; how much was my behavior due to how I chose to react to my situation; whether I could have just taken it all in and chose not to vent it toward people who didn't deserve it, been more conscientious and/or put up a better front for my loved ones - but maybe these aren’t even the right questions to ask. 

To respond to someone suffering a situation beyond their control by telling them they can help themselves by just choosing to react in a certain way is messed up.  There’s a time to realize your circumstances are a result of your decisions.  Psychologically, this is a healthy approach to have in most circumstances.  However, when we covered this in psychology class, the issue gnawed at me, and I asked how it applies to people who are in situations they can’t control.  So it turns out the corollary to this idea is that when you really are in a situation beyond your control, it’s obviously unhealthy to ascribe the situation to your own decisions, and in these situations it’s more healthy to acknowledge that you are NOT in control. 

Basically, the idea that you get what you earn is great for people who want to (and can) succeed, and well…toxic, for lack of a better word, for people who are dealing with situations beyond their own control.  And that's what I’ve been sorting out for years.

But the quote itself.

At age twelve, I decided to return to my chromosomal gender, and not soon afterward, I started having intrusive thoughts and some compulsive actions. To what degree these two things are connected might not even be the point; I mean, in roughly the same period of time, I left my special education school behind, lost contact with most of my special ed friends, and went to homeschooling to spend most of my time at my desk in my bedroom. The gender change may have just been the straw on the camel's back.  And my mom has alluded to having intrusive thoughts too, so there's also the possibility of heredity considering our DNA is a wreck.  We both have scoliosis, for example.  (Even though mine was nearly lethal, so...not entirely comparable.) 

At first, there was a period where I just took the intrusive thoughts at face value, and for a while I was legitimately “religious” in a superstitious sense, afraid of being under supernatural assault.  It actually took a year or two before I realized I was just having mental problems.  (Part of it was that it was so inconceivable to think I was “insane”.)  At some point I realized that if I was going to acknowledge the blasphemous things as not real, I'd have to accept the possibility of them - the scenario of losing the gambles, being damned, etc.  Now I’d know this as exposure therapy, but it made sense at the time.  And so after a while of taking the intrusive thoughts less seriously, as an effect I kind of became more secular, or at least not religious in any fundamental way, and started objecting to the idea of being “pure” in a theological or a moral sense, seeing it as a facade to hide the fear of confronting something that was necessary to confront.  I mean, the intrusive thoughts completely did not match my own moral standards, nor did the way I was reacting to them, so I kind of embraced the idea of being impure.

Additionally, I realized that the more time I spent thinking to myself alone - even learning, musing, things a scholar does - the more vulnerable I was to getting my mind tangled in itself so to speak.  So I consciously decided to embrace distractions.  I held myself to a regiment of video games and entertainment. Something I'm still very much, definitely doing today.

So there's two ways right there in which I, oddly enough, became accountable to my toxins. Instead of continuing to frame the issue as a fight against internal evil, I had to accept the intrusive thoughts in order to acknowledge the reality of what was ultimately glitchy and misguided chatter coming from my own head.  But in a way, this superstitious and strict time of my life improved me in some ways.  I learned to write during this time, listened to a few political issues for the first time.  I didn’t stay vegetarian or keep celebrating All Hallows Eve even though I decided Halloween was celebrating fear.  A lot of strict standards that I put on myself were beneficial, but ultimately some of it wasn’t balanced in the long run because it was more about avoidance than belief.  Avoidance that neglected "accountability to my toxins".

That wasn't it though, because once I started taking the testosterone injections, I went through the whole thing again.  I went back to the superstition and in a worse sense, because I was exposed to more to be superstitious about, with a brain that was restructuring to be critical under the testosterone's changes.  In a way, the synthetic testosterone is kind of a toxin to me, because I only acquiesce to it through choice.  I spent my first twelve years with this standard of femininity and this apprehension toward men and masculinity, and then I ended up chemically invaded by a drug that makes you masculine.  It's a kind of ironic punishment.  I got on a soapbox about men's rights because I lived the opposite attitude toward men that I felt alienated by once I accepted that I had to figure out how to live comfortably as a man.  When you're a little girl, it's easy to think "boy stands for bad, girl stands for good", but when you're a man, it's  frustrating to see that everybody thinks it’s a nitpick to be upset about these attitudes.  (“Of course women can hit men.  Men are brutes that need to be kept in check.”  Well, I’m a man.  “Well, you don’t count.  You’re not a typical guy.  Not until you do something that a typical guy would, then you count.”)

So though I had a hell of a time fitting in my new skin with these new personality traits that don’t always mesh well with the person I grew up as, I advocated for them because I realized it was a matter of respecting myself and the person I was, regardless of how secure I was in being that.  It's another way of being accountable for my own toxins.

The point here might be that we ultimately have to care for ourselves, including the parts of us that need the most care, however difficult it is to care for the parts of you that are the hardest to like.  My intrusive thoughts were just technically intrusive.  They were, somehow, just a cry of instability from inside me, something I could only untangle to a certain point by confronting them, and then maintaining that instability in some sense instead of trying to eradicate it somehow.  The humanist response ultimately worked.   And the issue with the testosterone, ultimately, worked with the same logic. 

And bringing it back to this episode of Rick and Morty - this is probably the most complex post I’ve ever written about my past because of a cartoon episode - I thought the way that they made a science fiction plot out of the figurative pop culture psychology concept of “toxicity” was brilliant, and I didn’t know how much I needed it.  They took this flawed concept that I associated with a terrible time in my life, and applied it in a way that was constructive, in a way that it mostly functioned the way everybody wants to use it, but also in a way that showed the flaws of the way it was misused.  And on top of that, during their metaphorical exploration, they covered one aspect of it that seemed to speak to an very specific issue in my life that nobody would really guess about.  That’s cool.