#unlearn that shit

[crankygryphon]

Visiting my parents really makes it obvious that I don’t eat nearly as much as I did when I lived with them. And I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life.

It really shows to go you that the whole “people get fat as adults because they settle down and get lazy/complacent” is total bullshit. Your weight has nothing to do with your work ethic or discipline or whatever. And it sure as hell doesn’t carry a moral value. I’m eating less! I’m at least, if not more, active than I was before moving out!(And this is all from circumstantial reasons, it wasn’t a conscious effort.) And I’ve gained 30-40 pounds in the past year! Fuck with me!!!

Like this is just what happens when you’re entering your third decade of life! Your metabolism changes! It’s natural!!

[pixipoxi]

i am referring to my own experience with men and how it’s quite obvious they feel & express emotion very differently to women. whether that be due to their neurochemistry, social convention or other environmental changes that dictate their behaviour when courting women specifically.

as a neuroscientist, i would LOVE to understand how men function when they’re interested in someone, and how they choose to express it. but i cannot without pulling their brains out of their skulls with tweezers or scanning them to the point of no return. so if it’s okay with you, i will continue to wonder about it.

does male yearning exist? do guys wait for girls to reply? do they think of them often during the day? do guys make playlists for their crush?

[muted-eternity]

Trying to process myself and my identity in 2024 is... such a bonkers process. And bonkers is such a funny word to describe a really serious set of emotions I've been embroiled in for so long, but it's 11pm and it's suitable enough.

But listen, okay, it's so complicated.

It feels, sometimes, like I don't quite know who or what I am or where I'm going or why or when I'll get there. The transient state of young adulthood, perhaps, or maybe a consequence of the modern, internet-connected reality that force feeds you so much information that it feels like everything is Going all the time and Won't (Might?) Stop. It makes me wish I could ball up my concept of self, take it out of my head, then unravel and pick it apart bit by bit, take notes, and attempt to understand. Maybe then I could put it all into words that make sense.

continue below the cut

--- --- ---

The rest of a very long post about self-reflection, gender, and the fuck growing up

I'm me, right? I've always been me. But the version of "me" that others perceive is not always the real one. I don't mean that in and (explicitly) edgy way, really, but let me explain:

I was me when I was a kid, yeah? I liked horses and dirt (sometimes) and fireflies and climbing trees and playing with dogs and sticks. I loved swimming. Wanted to be a mermaid for most of my childhood. Or a werewolf (that's a whole other thing).

I hated pink for most of my elementary, middle, and high school years. Don't remember what catalyzed that hatred, but I remember telling people it was because it was a girly color, and I was a tomboy. I didn't like pink. I wasn't like the girly girls, I was weird and messy and purple was superior anyway.

And I remember entering puberty years, and becoming a teenager. I remember a family friend and my mom buying me my first bras and me being like "ew, why do I need these again?" I didn't get it. I read the books my mom got me on bodily changes from American Girl, and tried to make it make sense.

I don't remember feeling distinctly that I was something else. I don't remember thinking I was supposed to be a boy.

I do remember spending a large chunk of my childhood caught between boyhood and girlhood, internally and externally. Most of my friends before second grade were boys (well, it was probably split even but my three closest friends in memory were 2 boys and a girl and I played with the boys at recess.) I remember, after we moved the first time, not understanding why the boys at my new school didn't want to include me in their games, or why the girls all gave me weird looks.

I remember not fitting in (at all, into either category, or otherwise). I remember feeling weird and ostracized and alone.

But I also remember embracing that. If I was going to be the weird kid, then great! Weird is cool, I can do weird. That means everything I do is weird! This won't have any repercussions on my psyche at all.

(I loved it until I didn't, until (although I didn't call it this then) I had internalized the idea of being weird and alone to the point that I didn't recognize I was lonely - or at least denied it very strongly. I spent so much time alone, within my own imagination, that I didn't care or remember that I still needed people. No one pointed that out for me either.)

My teen years, as a result of the previously-mentioned everything, were... well, they were a wreck. I didn't blame it on my bodily development at the time but it was probably a factor. As was the instillation of religious guilt, self-loathing, and shame. But I was a wreck ages 13-18, is the long and short of it.

I didn't feel right. I didn't feel at home, or accepted, or "right" in any sense of the word or in any one place. My views then were very far right for a teen (courtesy of my parents), and I took pride in being the odd one out in society bc of that, in much of the same way I embraced being a weird, alone kid.

I isolated myself. I taught myself (or was taught by my environment) that it was good the World was against me, that I was doing the right thing by opposing the World and clinging to Christ and "American exceptionalism" and listening to Rush Limbaugh. I angled myself against the queer community, started wars in comment sections, determined to never fall for the wiles and tricks of the Worldly American left.

(And this, I say gently, was before I was even fifteen. So much changed when I was 14, and 15, and 16.)

To reiterate: I was a wreck.

I was also everything my parents ever wanted. I got good grades, I did well in homeschool and when I re-entered society in 8th grade. I hated the American left, I hated (though we didn't use that word) the gays and the transes and all the other nonsense.

But then I re-entered society and had to face that I had been living in a very isolated, very narrow-minded bubble. 8th grade was pretty rough all around, as a result.

And you know what? I'm glad it was rough. It needed to be, for me to start to think for myself and learn that being ostracized for horrible beliefs was not a virtuous act. Rejection by the whole of society was (and is) a bad thing.

And in 8th and 9th grade, I met trans and queer people for the first time. Even in rural-ass T-county. I listened to them, even if I didn't want to, and I didn't pick fights. I got online and started trying to understand them more.

And it resonated.

It resonated, and I denied it. I felt something when I watched those shitty 2010s student films on being trans, and it wasn't disgust. It was sympathy.

I was still a little shit until I was 15 or 16. I didn't start to question the beliefs I'd been spoon-fed for quite some time (though I'm eternally glad I did). What I did, though, was create new characters. One was this weird, morally gray mind-controller called Raze which, if you know anything about my pet project Broken Dimensions, might ring some bells. Raze was the precursor to several characters: Nathan Shasear, Ev, Phantasma... At the time, Raze was also Like Me. A tomboy - a woman masquerading as a man, in fact. They weren't who they outwardly professed to be, and led a hidden life. They were also deeply in love with their rival-slash-best friend, Fin Heran (yes, this is the same Fin Heran, more or less).

Raze was my first (well, second on a technicality) queer character. Fin Heran was my first non-heterosexual character (he was and still is caught in between being bi- and pansexual). I denied, for literal years, that neither of those things were true. But it was a start, and it was an outlet.

Eventually, I got to 16 or 17 and accepted the reality that not only were my family's views kind of crazy and not really alright, but also that they targeted me. I didn't put a label on it yet, no - I couldn't possibly be gay, or trans, or (shudders) nonbinary - but I did accept that I didn't fit my parents' perfect idea of "me" either.

Then I hit 18 and went away to finish the degree I started at 16 and everything went off the rails.

Let's pause here. A critical thing to add to everything I've just written is that, from ages 13 or 14 to fucking 19 years old I was deeply, painfully suicidal. That's the side-effect of being raised/raising yourself to believe that nothing you ever do will ever compare to God's plans, or the death of his son. Nothing will ever save you enough for you to not have to pray for forgiveness every night (which you should do; you should grovel, and be thankful he doesn't smite you for the egregious sin of being a teenager with sexual thoughts).

The only goal I had in those years was surviving long enough to serve the kingdom somehow. I knew I didn't want to have kids. I thought maybe I could be a Bible teacher (never a missionary. You didn't want to be a missionary). I never planned on using art to help the church. In fact, I never really planned to live past 21. I prayed, almost nightly, to die in my sleep or in an accident, that way I wouldn't disappoint my parents or fail or have to keep up this awful cycle of begging for forgiveness.

(God, that's horrible, isn't it? I'm allowed to say that's horrible, right? I shouldn't have been suicidal at 13, least of all because I believed I was a sinner who didn't deserve to be alive. What a horrible thing to teach a child, even indirectly.)

So, to recap:

I characterized myself as a "weird kid" for most of my childhood to cope with being ostracized by my peers for not fitting it. I lost my friend group twice (not mentioned previously, we moved once and then a second time. Once to Virginia (age 8), once back home (age 12), and I lost touch with all my friends from both eras). I didn't fit in with either the boys or the girls after my first school.

Then, I characterized myself as being alone and ostracized because I wasn't "of the world" and believed in better things. A victim complex, maybe. Later on, this developed into a deep-set belief that I was perpetually inadequate, despite the fact that I had never really sinned at all. I believed I was never good enough, and at the same time I was learning about trans and gay and queer people fighting off the innate sympathy I had for them with a cruddy stick.

Then I went to college and it all came crashing down.

Right, you with me? Yes? No? Whatever, let's keep going down this rabbit hole.

Everything went off the rails when I got to college because, for the first time, I wasn't surrounded by people or ideologies telling me how or what to think. My roommate and I were both on the asexual spectrum, which led to us talking about our experiences and our heavily closeted experiences queer people. For the first time, I was able to talk freely about my (by now quite large) cast of queer characters in what was becoming Broken Dimensions. I could talk about myself. I could voice my struggles to reconcile my strict Christian beliefs with my very non Christian lifestyle.

That didn't go well.

By 18 I was much more emotionally intelligent than I was at 13. (I'd like to say that's true from 18 to now, at 21, too.) My views on the world had changed and been challenged. I was learning acceptance - of myself and of others - and was on my way to being a better person, and to accepting that I was not, really at all, a bad person. That I had good intentions, and that I was inherently good, not inherently bad.

But I was still a wreck. You can't hold on to such stark cognitive dissonance for so long (in this case: trying to maintain that queerness in fiction, at least, wasn't wrong but neither was my LGBTQ+ hating religious group) and not be a complete wreck.

I tried therapy right before I went to college. It sucked. I cried a lot. Steve, bless his heart, let me. He prompted me to think about what I was saying, the layers of myself I was hiding in and behind, and what I really thought and why. He didn't get to see the process he started carry out, because I stopped seeing him when I left in the fall.

I tried virtual talk therapy while I was at college, after my roommate moved out of our shitty dorm and I was too alone with my thoughts. (I didn't like being alone anymore. I knew I was actually lonely, and that it sucked.) Virtual therapy was, all in all, not a complete waste. Only most of one. I cried more. I had two therapists tell me I probably had ADHD, and that I definitely had depression and anxiety. I stopped virtual therapy when I returned home in the spring, when my dad suggested I try a Christian therapist instead. (I had a panic attack when he suggested that.)

After that, I did most of my reflection and character de- and reconstruction on my own. I started to construct a new sense of self, which promptly blew up last summer when my mom found out just how different the real me is from the perfect little girl she raised.

And now we're here.

What the fuck are we at? Not a superior point of realization, certainly. I still don't know what the fuck is going on inside my head.

(That's a lie. I do. I know so much about what goes on inside my head. There are too many thoughts - that's the (now very likely) ADHD. Story stuff is going wild at all times. There's a lot of queer sex stuff circulating up there, despite me still definitively being on the asexual spectrum. There's still a fair bit of guilt and anxiety, but considerably less depression. I don't hate myself or other people anymore, nor do I think it's morally right to do so. I know a lot of the important stuff about my identity as a person that could fill its own giant text post. But my point still stands.)

See, I know my past. I know everything I just typed out, I know how awful I was a as kid, a teenager. I know so much of it was from how I was raised - and that I did good by unlearning and continuing to unlearn that shit. I grew up, which relates to the common theme of the current younger generations becoming more emotionally mature and outwardly cognizant than their parents. I know all that now.

But where do I go with this?

I spent most of my teenage years not planning for the future. In the last 4 or 5 years, I've been very actively trying to compensate for that because I realized 1) I don't want to die anymore and 2) I don't want to live in the Church of Christ/Christian nationalism bubble (and haven't since 2021). That hasn't been fun.

What also hasn't been fun is my desperate attempts to make up for my lack of self-exploration as a teen. Everyone else learned who they wanted to be in high school, at least to an extent. They made friends who sympathized or empathized with them. They changed their hair, their clothes, their names, their labels. I started doing all that at 18 and 19.

Am I a boy? No. I wanted to be, in some aspects, as a kid. I wanted the freedom that came with being born male. But I don't want to be male, at least not the way trans men do. I feel a connection with both masculinity and femininity, the former moreso than the latter. I want top surgery and HRT, but what does that mean for my gender identity? What does that mean for how I'm supposed to tell society I perceive myself?

How do I perceive myself?

This is spiraled into quite a long piece of text that basically explored my entire childhood. Why am I going to share this on the internet? Another unanswerable question. To submit myself to the mortifying idea of being known, partially. And to see if anyone else resonates. Maybe it's also some sort of self-issued punishment, airing out the dirty laundry of how I thought as a teenager. I dunno.

Also most of this was written after 11pm on a Sunday night, so. Take that for what you will.

Signing off, or something.

-- Ripley, they/them

LINK: companion post where I word vomit about gender.

[fagdykeposting]

Some of ya’ll just traded bioessentialism for gender essentialism and called it a day.

You are not progressive for your bigotry against trans, gay, and other queer men.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

prayer of the day:

[kacievvbbbb]

Looking at the ASL trio, especially now at their big ages, you'd think Sabo would be the polite one which is why it's so funny that he is the rudest ass of the lot of them.

have you thinking he's all genial and good mannered with his cravat and top hat and shit just before he beats your ass with a rusty ass pipe like a street thug (which he infact was as a child).

what a mean kid. 😭

[mikichko]

i don't know why we have to remind y'all every single month to think about how you write characters of color. like is someone pressing the men in black neuralyzer periodically or what?

i can understand that a majority of y'all did not grow up in the US and you certainly didn't grow up being at the end of horrific racist remarks and attacks here. but that same device you're using to write all of your fics has this crazy feature that allows you to research things. crazy concept, i know.

a handful of you need to research racism and xenophobia treatment towards the group your characters are from because you're perpetuating those same mentalities when you write them. you claim to be soooo against racism and yet, here you go perpetuating the same image of these people that racists keep pandering to this day. putting these characters in situations that are just plain fucking weird and wrong with the histories tied to these groups. and even just using plain fucking slurs because you don't do your goddamn research.

i do not expect you to know everything. hell, i don't know everything and I'm still learning about horrible things that many groups were subjected to. but jesus christ it is not hard to look into the groups and histories of these characters.

y'all will do everything under the sun to make sure that your characters, their professions, their backgrounds, and their nationalities are presented correctly but you'll completely miss the ball when it comes to the individual struggles of the folks within their ethnic and racial groups.

you just end up perpetuating the racism and microaggressions you're so vocally fighting against.

[rakkuntoast]

there should be a class study on how smplive changed the way modern mcyt online discourse (at least on twitter) goes instead of fuckass knee deep dives about dsmptwt from an outsider that wasnt even there to witness it

[satyrradio]

No, guys, *our* labeling of this group of trans people as MRAs is actually good this time. Wha-? Yes, I know TERFs do the same thing with 'TRA', but we're different! It's good this time! This group of trans people fighting for visibility are actually stupid and privileged! For real!! Guys! Guys

[sandinmybed]

can i be fr for a minute?? sending abuse to people online for holding different views than you is not activism and in fact actively hurts your cause. most people are not extreme in their viewpoints, you can give them a new perspective if you're willing to spend some time explaining shit. if someone is saying something you disagree with and you rush in there to condescend to them and call them disgusting and subhuman and dont even TRY to explain calmly why their views are harmful, they're going to shut you out instantly and double down on their views.

most people are simply genuinely ignorant to the issues they're talking about - they just pick their views up from the news and the world around them and express opinions because that's what every person does. if you run in there and tell them they're scum for it, what then? if someone does that to you, are you going to think "maybe i should do some research" or are you going to think "this person is an asshole, im blocking them." a lot of you think you're activists and then refuse to do any kind of actual WORK to support your cause.

[crobones]

"kendrick's a misogynist too!" okay but like

we know. HE knows. he made a whole ass album addressing his trauma and how it lead to but did not excuse his abusive behaviour. and how he's trying to do better. to BE better.

"drake accused him of beating his wife!"

kendrick himself alluded to allegedly having an abusive relationship with his wife. he doesn't go into details, so it's possible he doesn't mean physically, while drake is accusing it of being physical.

here's the thing. (for me, at least.) drake vastly fucking misinterpreted "Mother I Sober" so much so that he put the worst bars i've ever heard in his most recent diss saying that Kendrick was sexually assaulted as a child. AS. A. DISS. like, Kendrick himself said he wasn't and Drake not only didn't comprehend the lyrics, but also made fun of Kendrick's so called trauma. like. the fuck? it wouldn't be a big leap to assume he misinterpreted the rest of Kendrick's lyrics - willfully or not.

again, on his album Mr. Morale, Kendrick is connecting a lot of his behaviour to - but not excusing it with - his childhood trauma. a generational curse. iirc he also pretty much says he's seeking help (which is encouraged by his wife pretty openly, seeing as she features on several songs in the album)

[itsabouttimex2]

Do you think your biases can affect how you interact with the fandoms and people within them or are you too into your interpretations to and opinions to properly understand and listen to those that differ?

Asking since I really like your stuff but you feel unapproachable sometimes and I’m a little worried about getting scolded/j

If I ever come off as unapproachable, I really am sorry about that. I’ll be honest about the fact that I’m pretty bad at expressing myself, and I’ve spent a lifetime of being written off when not outright discriminated against (I live in a very religious state) when I do speak up, so I’ve developed a very blunt (and often harsh) way of communicating that I’ve come to realize translates poorly to how people communicate on the web- I’ve been working on amending that and adopting a more neutral tone both for my fanfiction and any commentary I have- but I’ll confess that I’m still not perfect at it.

Part of being autistic is that the world is presented to me through a set of “filters” that make it hard for me to properly convey and infer tone, intention, seriousness, etc, and I’ll be honest about that too- how the average person thinks and feels to me is utterly alien. My own perspectives and morals can be just as alien to others as theirs are to me, so I don’t blame people for being confused or put off.

That being said, I am genuinely open to the perspectives of other people- I’ve said this before, but I am willing to have my view changed when a good counterargument is provided.

And, no matter who you are or what perspective you have, I am legitimately open to communicating- whether you’d like to make a request when my inbox is open, ask about my AUs or perspective, or send a DM- I do sincerely like hearing from people.

(I’m really not the scolding sort, I swear! I’ll snipe at fandom trends and plot holes, but the everyday anon is off the table.)

[incornarei]

finished honest hearts a few weeks ago … still thinking abt it

[kerosene-saint]

I wish people didn't act like dd/lg or abdl were like pedophilia. not even into it and I'm a sfw age regressor (non community due to this problem) but like. ugh. and the problem is my views on it have changed so much over just this year. because guess what. whatever people do in their free time surrounding sex, as long as it is not genuinely illegal, should not fucking matter to you. it is not your fucking business to tell people you think their kink is gross and pedophilic, especially because it's not pedophilia. it is fine. to be uncomfortable with a kink page of a certain kind interacting with you. I get it. and there are some pretty mean people in those communities but guess what? there are mean people in EVERY COMMUNITY. and you do not have to relate that kink to pedophilia to say you'd prefer their kink blogs to not interact with whatever blog you have. but when you say shit like "pedos and also people into ddlg and abdl dni" it's annoying. you could say "ddlg/abdl blogs dni" absolutely fair. but saying don't interact abt an entire group of people of which you do not necessarily have the means of checking everyone for being in that community??? alright then. you have fun in puppy play isn't anything like fucking dogs but ddlg is like fucking children world.

[eggwishing]

CRINGE AND FREE CRINGE AND FREE CRINGE AND FREE I AM CRINGE AND FREE FOR EVER

[cybertron-smash-or-pass]

i knew it would happen but oh my god. oh my. fucking god. i couldn't imagine it would be so bad when requesting. i was thinking about the lola propaganda and emo boy lovers and the gross freak haters. i couldn't possibly imagine that he would get such a GIANT pass percentage. yes there's six more hours to go but i know it's going to get worse over the night. As the blog curator is he really now the most passed on character I'm curious

Currently Masterson is still at a higher percentage than Beast Machines Rattrap, who I believe is our current Least Fuckable character. Masterson clears the bar by a whole percent.

And with your help we can set the bar even lower. It's not too late to Get His Ass

I don't know beachcomber too well but any humanfucker bots are welcome here.

Admittedly I was thinking at least a little bit about the rescue bots when I wrote the post because I swear to Primus every one of the main cast of bots is trying to fuck humans. Not even necessarily their human partners specifically (boulder and heatwave absolutely are tho), but at some point, every one of the bots has Said or Done Some Shit in the show that reads like they're interested in getting with humans. Prowl "I've fantasized about being human before" TFA walked so the rescue bots could sprint.

(I've also just kinda had Boulder/Graham Brainrot lately, so that might be contributing lmao)