April 13th, 2024
I took this screenshot of a webcomic I found one day and decided to spend time I could've been sleeping reading through it. I'd never heard of it before a few days ago when I was browsing old GameFAQs forums for Team Fortress 2. I'm not gonna act like it's some hidden gem just because I got a bunch of cute screenshots of a catgirl. It was made by the easily impressed for the easily impressed. The only reason you've never heard of it is because it features a cat girl and a squirrel girl, other than that it's no different to Ctrl Alt Delete. Of course that may be a stretch, being that I haven't read all of Ctrl Alt Delete and I'm not interested in a comparitive breakdown of misogyny and other hate crimes between the two. Anyways, the comic isn't really important to this entry.
I wonder if I should stop being so preoccupied with other people. What that would look like is my early highschool days where I couldn't tell the difference between a friend and a bully, and all people who talk to me are just talking heads looking for something to do. Maybe you think that my solution of "just care less" is careless, but being preoccupied with people never did any good for me.
Everyone wants to be a philosopher when they're sad. James Baldwin put this into words years before I was born, "And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important...you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with." But when I say "Everyone wants to be a philosopher when they're sad." I keep feeling as though I have to follow it up with a "but". I could tell you something like "But does anyone find the answer?" but I know that some people do. I could tell you "But no one wants the answer" but I Know that confronting the zeitgeist of bigotry is important to me. I could tell you "But no one wants to get along," as though whether you figure out what caused your pain is less important than, I don't know, being a friend or community member and making sure people, you included, feel less lonely in the world, but I don't fully believe that either.
Everyone wants to be a philosopher when they're sad. I only want to say "but" to denounce the act of doing this. I wish it were different. I don't want to be a philosopher.
Perhaps if I came out the womb without intellectual disability I wouldn't be writing this right now. Most of the shit I've gone through has to do with ableism, but "You're being ableist right now" just feels an easily dismissible accusation. My preoccupation with people, fuelled by years of bullying and neglect from authority figures, plus the one time I was psychologically abused, all came down to trying to pinpoint specific accusations against people, and then figuring out how I could accurately bring them out of the retrospect and into the present. This is of course based on the tempting gamble that you can avoid pain and disappointment before it happens by putting people and interactions under scrutiny.
I see it now that after I was psychologically abused, in this weird time in my life where I had dropped out of highschool and wasn't in a workplace I could make friends at, very lonely with no one to talk to, I became obsessed with this idea that any friends who came into my life after this point would be extra caring. I projected my loneliness onto this ideal friend who had also gone through the motions of getting to know people in casual, conveninent contexts only to realise that you're surrounded by people who don't care that much. My ideal friend at this time was someone mutually obsessive and loyal under the philosophy of "the world hurt us and we have to stick together because we won't hurt eachother." And... it almost happened, or rather it happened in reverse. Instead of going out looking for someone to mutually obsess over and choosing someone who met some exceedingly rare criteria, I just happened to meet someone online and we appreciated eachother's blogs and it came to be that we found appreciation for eachother. You might say that sounds like I took the healthy route in becoming friends with someone, and I did, and looking back I'm surprised I didn't fuck it up somehow.
I wrote that last line three hours ago and it feels like implying I could fuck it up is wrong.
It really sucks being psychologically abused. It feels like the chance to be in a better place was taken from me.
I don't want to obsess over humanity anymore. I hope it's easy getting over it. I wish I was less lonely.