I think pining is valid if and only if you are loving the person as they truly exist—as separate from you and with their own free will—as opposed to loving a false version of them in your head who never left you or came back to you. if your love doesn’t include their freedom to not choose you, it’s not love.
If your love doesn’t include their freedom to not choose you, it’s not love.
It’s the difference between the made up “friend zone” and unrequited love.
Unrequited love means “I love you for who you are but you don’t love me, I’m sad but I still love you for who you are.”
The “friend zone” means “I was nice to you because I love my romanticized version of you and/or want sex from you but you don’t feel the same way so now you’re an evil bitch who broke my heart but I still love the romanticized version of you I have in my head.”
actually the best ship dynamic is i would kill for you. i would kill anyone who layed a hand on you. please let me kill for you. please let me show my devotion by dirtying my hands, it’s the only way i know how. let me destroy anything that hurts you. i’ve hurt you too. i’m destroying myself.
Forget unrequited love, you know what’s really tragic? requited love but they’re doomed by the narrative. It doesn’t matter that they love each other, it doesn’t matter how hard they love, they were doomed from the start.
my take “generative ai is neither supernaturally good nor supernaturally evil, but is in fact just a computer program, which can be used in both effective and ineffective ways” continues to be oddly hot for reasons I don’t entirely understand
my beloved mutuals a couple of you need to cool it with the moral purity stuff about AI. we do know that opening the chat gpt website does not actually put a stain on your soul, right. like it’s fine to critique specific things about AI and how it’s used but the devil’s sacrament stuff is a little concerning.
i love my therapist but i hate being in therapy. 10 minutes before my appointment, i’m in a meeting with my boss - we discuss my artistic choices; my boss recommends i artistically choose less. 10 minutes after therapy, i wash my hair and think about everything that was said, and then i have to switch it off, like a lamp, and go back to work again.
i was on a walk the other day and someone had the perfect combination of his cologne and whatever-else. it was almost exactly his scent. i fucking hate that. after all these years, i remember that? i tell my therapist - i feel like a fucking wolf. try telling a middle-aged blonde lady. oh i scented him on the air. i’m 30, and i’m having a panic attack over something that would be a plotline in the omegaverse.
what they don’t tell you about mental illness is that if you are lucky enough to survive it into adulthood; it becomes a weird slice of your life. because you do, eventually, have to build a life. i realized in a panic somewhere around 22 - oh. i don’t know what i’m fucking doing, because i always assumed i’d just go ahead and die. i didn’t die, and i’m grateful for that, and i’m very happy about that choice. but it does mean that i am an adult in an apartment, living with my conditions side-by-side like. oh, that’s my roommate, adhd.ignore the glass, bytheway, that’s ocd.
so you pick your stupid life up by the scruff of the neck and you’re, like glad for it (so much laughter and light and friends you would have never thought possible, when you were in the worst of it). but it feels so strange to be dancing around these odd little microcosms, these patchwork moments of your symptoms. if you have a panic attack at night, you still need to wake up and walk the dog in the morning. if your depression is making everything boring, well, you don’t have any sick days left, and a job’s not really supposed to be that exciting anyway. your ocd tears out each individual leg hair, and then, an hour later, you sigh, patch up the bloody bits, and go get dinner with friends. and the life is kitten-quiet, mewling and pathetic, but it’s also like - it’s yours, so you’re fond of it.
and it’s like - you’re real. so you still enjoy pushing the shopping cart really fast and then riding on the back of it down an empty aisle. and you’re not, like, so sick anymore that when you accidentally drop a mug you burst into tears (except for the days you do that. which are bad). and no, you’re not allowed around certain items anymore. oops! but you’ve learned to be good about brushing your teeth most days of the week. and you sometimes in the middle of the day you have a little freak-out about how fucking unfair it all is, how fucking hard, how other people can just do this without having to fucking hurt the whole time. and then you sigh and force yourself to sit down and fucking journal about it so you can tell the nice middle-aged blonde woman yeah i had a hard day but i practiced grounding. you still sometimes want to burst out of your own skin, but you force yourself to eat kind-of healthy and to take your vitamins. you let yourself chop off all your hair in the sink in a dramatic poetry of control and relief - and you also have developed good hobbies that help you move your body more frequently. you feel helplessly behind, lost in the shuffle - but you also practice gratitude, taking stock of what you have garnered. because you’re trying. even if you’re never gonna be normal, you have something… close enough.
and the little kitten of your life, this mangy, starlit tigercub, this thing you expected to rot so young: in your arms, it turns itself over, belly-up. exposing this new soft part, all the organs and guts. like it’s saying i trust you now. youwon’t give me up.
