#then you're going to live an extremely miserable hyperaware life and you're going to verge into dangerous territory

[nolanhattrick]

it amazes me that people will proactively refuse joy and wonder and fascination because their interests aren't flawless.

you are not flawless. you are a deeply flawed human being that has done things that are despicable in another person's eyes. you will be considered morally reprehensible by some for doing something you consider completely innocuous.

if you limit your associations to "only the hobbies and people i deem 110% worthy and perfectly clean and pure" you're not only going to live the most boring life imaginable, you're going to fail. nothing is pure. everything is exploitative in some way, shape, or form. when you try and pretend like your hands are clean by saying "well i never liked x in the first place" you're lying.

if you liked carter hart as a player and had a fan blog about him you don't get to retcon that part of your life by saying you never liked him. it's disingenuous.

if you had a harry potter blog and worshipped the ground jkr walked on and got the dark mark tattoed on your body you don't get to lie and say that it wasn't a significant part of your life. you can't take that away from your past and you can't take that away from the people that witnessed it.

if you liked something in the past that turned out to be problematic and now you don't let yourself experience joy at all whatsoever, you're missing the point of being a human person with character growth.

something we do in trauma-informed radical acceptance work is to focus on not going too far in our 180. we acknowledge our feelings of negativity, of anxiety, of anger, and we approach them with curiosity so that they get processed and felt to completion. this way, our bodies learn that strong emotions are safe instead of something to avoid.

this allows our bodies to recognize joy, wonder, amazement, love, and excitement as positive sensations, and not sensations to suppress or reject.

allow yourself to find joy in things, even if your past interests were found to be harmful. you will find safe things that bring you joy. they're out there, even if they aren't "flawless".