“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
Oftentimes, it hurts the more we resist the sadness. It makes me feel frustrated and guilty when I fight my sadness, so I’ve learned to just ride it out instead until I can feel calmer and ready for happiness again. 🌊
batman not being in birds of prey is so funny to me bc its like once he hears about harley’s situation, he fucks off to a different country for a “vacation”, and gets the occasional update from alfred that’s like “well sir, she blew up the ace chemicals.” and bruce is like:
and then he goes back to doing weird justice league grade bullshit detective work.
when jenny slate said “domesticity is very sacred to me. making a home is… it’s just, like, the central thing in my life. when I cannot make a home, even in a hotel room, I feel really lost. putting everything in a certain place on purpose. not just, like, throwing shit down. but putting everything in a certain place on purpose and starting to sort of figure out how the trains run, basically. like, what are the paths? what are the paths in the house that you’re going to take the most and what can you line those paths with? or, in the hotel room, like, where are you going to put your journal and your book, so that you’re just starting to create little pathways in this garden and that they mark that space? I just take it really seriously. it’s sort of like… it’s so sweet, it’s sort of like when you see children playing a game and you know they’re marking out a world. and they’re like, “this is where the dungeon is! and this is where the kitchen is in the castle! and this is where the-“, and you can’t see anything but the backyard but they can see everything. that’s what i’m doing and i’m doing it all the time. all the time. and it’s always there. even when I get into a car, I think about where i’m sitting and how i’m sitting and what i’m touching. and I just try hard to do that.”
Okay so I was at work and I had the hiccups and I was stocking an aisle and this lady in the aisle heard me hiccuping and said “oh have you got the hiccups?” and I said yeah and she said “…Do you want me to get rid of them?” and I thought she meant she was going to scare me so I was like “n-no thanks” and she was like “you want to keep your hiccups??” and I said “yeah please dont scare me” and then I wandered off
And then a couple minutes later I still had hiccups and she walked by on her way out and she said “I wasn’t going to scare you you know” and I said “you weren’t?” and she said “no – I have a way I can cure hiccups” and I was like “well what is it?” she’s like “theres something about me that when I talk to people their hiccups just go away. i just chat or maybe tell them a story and after a minute or so their hiccups are just gone” and I thought she was like definitely on some pseudoscience shit so i kind of laughed and joked like “you should expect a call from the X-Men soon then” and she said “no. For real. I bet your hiccups are gone now aren’t they?” and sure enough my fucking hiccups were gone. They stopped while she was speaking to me and didn’t come back all night
what the fuck kind of power did this woman have… was she a hiccup witch??? I have so many questions for her
One thing abusers love to do is revision the past. Something happened, and you know you got hurt, you still remember their cruel words and the pain and how it made you trust them less, how the idea of them doing it again terrifies you and you’ve been resorting to tip-toeing around them just to not provoke them, to not accidentally set them off again.
But then, after a while, you mention the event, or they mention it, and they tell you it happened differently. They tell you the changed version - to the point of what they did and said was something completely different, something that makes them look good, something that makes it seem as if you overreacted, or over-dramatized the entire situation. They didn’t really hurt you, they didn’t really do anything cruel or scary, you just like to make things up, the were actually a delight, and you’re stupid for having such a fearful reaction of the now, your entire fear is actually based on nothing and you’re stupid for feeling it.
So you feel small, like even your version of events can’t be taken for real, you start to doubt what you see and hear, you start to worry other people too, will dismiss you side of the story based on you remembering everything wrong. It makes you scared to speak your side of the story at all after a while. You wonder if you really did make it all up. You wonder if you’re in the wrong after all. You don’t try to argue with them or call them out anymore, because your entire point of view will be denied as false, you will not be allowed to talk like a person who has something real to say anymore. You feel like your experiences and emotions are insignificant.
However, the event they revisioned, it happened exactly the way you remember it. They did everything you remember, everything they deny was absolutely real, completely happened. It actually did exactly what they wanted. It scared you, it kept you frightened, extremely sensitive to their moods, tiptoeing around their emotions, always ready to please them to avoid a potential disaster. It worked pretty great for them didn’t it? They got to feel big and important because they terrified you into submission. But then that wasn’t enough, oh no, they also had to make you feel as if you did all that on your own accord, not out of fear, not out of terrifying memory they engraved in your brain, nah, they almost look kinda bad doing that, and we can’t have that, no. Even if the price is your sanity.
And if you look back on every time this has happened, you can notice a pattern. How come every event you “remembered wrong” is specifically an event when they terrify and abuse you, when they do something cruel, something that makes them look bad, something they did wrong. It’s always those instances your senses are accused of being wrong, somehow. If you mention times when they did something they’re proud of, there’s no complaint, right? It turns out you can remember things just fine, that you experience things completely normal, and what they’re saying is that if your sense aren’t working in their favour, then you shouldn’t be allowed any.
Being able to feel completely certain in your own experiences, and to talk without a doubt if what you’re saying is true and real, is a human quality we all absolutely need. You can’t express what you’ve gone thru, and what you’re going thru, if you can’t do this. You do not get to communicate your experiences, you do not get to be understood, to be reassured, comforted, you miss out on necessary human experience of sharing your point of view, sharing what you’re going thru. How could you talk about your own life if you aren’t allowed to have your own point of view? How could you get anyone to relate to you and understand if you’re forced to doubt everything, if you can’t even say it?
This is not okay. Taking your certainty in your own memory is not okay. Making you feel small so they wouldn’t feel bad about terror they brought into your life isn’t okay. Their revisions to the past are fake. Events are exactly how you remember them and don’t let anyone make you doubt your own senses. You are right about what you went thru. Nobody has the right to tell you it didn’t happen.
This is the part that the wealthy hate about most people being satisfied with what they have. If we strive for more then they can threaten us with it, but if we don’t care they have nothing to steal nor to threaten.
In case you ever feel badly about spending the money you work hard to earn.
