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younglegends) wrote2024-06-27 07:58 pm
younglegends) wrote2024-06-27 07:58 pm
Entry tags:
[journal] fall in love again and again
hi guys... what's up. miss u guys in my phone btw i never tweet anymore idk why :( the spirit of posting has Died within me i need to revive it. so here is a giant midyear catch-up post of whatever i feel like ig. anyway guys did you know: something is better than nothing.
this week i went camping at a campsite four hours away and drove for much of the way there and back. i hate driving and can't park a car to save my life but driving down the highways in the mountains by forests and lakes going 110km/hr speed limit while singing along to music is actually kinda fun maybe they were onto something there. i mean until my neck starts hurting but you know. i'm really lucky to live where i live. honestly i'm not one of god's campers but it is really nice once in a while to chill by a campfire and fall asleep listening to the sounds of a lake and wake up at 5 am with the world quiet and bright...
TIGERS BLOOD - waxahatchee: 3 sisters, evil spawn, ice cold, right back to it, bored, lone star lake, 365. so excited to see waxahatchee in aug with s because saint cloud + this album are genuinely becoming two of my all-timers. tweet thats like "What the fuck is waxahatchee talking about but also exactly". take my money i don't work that hard... so true
BRAT - charli xcx: everything is romantic, 365, b2b, talk talk, sympathy is a knife, von dutch, girl so confusing lorde remix which saved the song btw. i'll be honest this album is no hifn or pop2 for me but i'm really happy for her + the acclaim she's getting this era. i also think it's so funny listening to 365 on the way to work at 7am every morning like dont sleep dont eat just do it on repeat yeah...
WHAT A DEVASTATING TURN OF EVENTS - rachel chinouriri: the hills, never need me, my everything, all i ever asked, my blood, cold call... basically the entire album lmfao. listened to this after a random tweet on my fyp listed this as their top album this year and kind of became obsessed from first listen.
THE RISE AND FALL OF A MIDWEST PRINCESS - chappell roan: femininomenon, red wine supernova, naked in manhattan. yes i checked out this album after her meteoric rise and the first time i heard that first prechorus in naked in manhattan i literally teared up... the pure distilled emotion of her voice delivering i wanna know baby what is it like. i cannot sing good luck babe to save my life btw and actually trying it on my roadtrip was the most humbling experience ever
shoutout also to movie soundtracks, specifically CHALLENGERS and I SAW THE TV GLOW. from the latter i really loved caroline polachek's starburned and unkissed, yeule's cover of anthems for a 17yo girl, and moonlight by the weather station. also, this track that plays in the planetarium scene, you know the one.
MAY DECEMBER: 4.5/5. loved the character work, the acting, the cold horror of the ending. grasping for meaning, grasping for art, and for what. movies that actually made me physically tense. "this is just what grown-ups do."
POOR THINGS: 2/5. i'm an emma stone enjoyer but this was the barbie movie of the oscar gauntlet last year for me. took so long and to say what? ending so cartoonish i literally could not believe my eyes
PAST LIVES: 2/5. i always had a feeling i wouldn't like this movie but watched it anyway to pleasantly surprise myself... well that did not happen :( i'm generally an enjoyer of childhood friends/missed connections but this movie did nothing for me. came across overly sentimental, even cliched, without feeling earned. her ending walk thru the city earned back a whole star for me though.
BONES AND ALL: 4/5. ultimately didn't like the use of a "villain" character as it felt a little forced to allow for the ending. i would have preferred for him to remain a one-off, as an entry/gatekeeper into a new world, if you will. but i really loved the attention paid to objects in this movie, if that makes any sense at all... the physicality of the mundane, the beautiful. those flashes that would sometimes run through a character's mind as they lay half-asleep in a dream, and that was all we would get... i was enthralled!! also perhaps one of the most horrifying mother-daughter scenes in all of fiction, which is REALLY saying something.
ALL OF US STRANGERS: 2/5. sorry but this movie actually kinda pissed me off... again i love themes of aloneness, being unable to move on from grief, the hope/horror of fantasy, but this story or maybe its execution reallyyy did not work for me. all of it just to be like "damn... hurt people hurt people 😔" are u for serious rn... yes i cried during the scene where his dad apologizes for not checking up on him as a kid when he was crying alone in his room like ofc i get it but as a letterboxd review i saw put it, ok somebody's been doing inner child healing in therapy but that does not a whole movie make... overall found this corny rather than moving but i do seem to be in the minority here so maybe it just wasn't for me.
CHALLENGERS x2: 4.5/5 we are soo back. everyones already talked this movie to death and i have nothing to add other than yes i loved it. i think the part that gets me the most is actually the gum parallel. like i actually flinched like i was shot the first time i saw it. which btw is a testament to the strength of the NON LINEAR NARRATIVE <3 to have him do it with tashi at the start is like ok intimacy ok rituals love it then to go back thirteen years and see him do it with patrick and everything SHIFTED. SEISMIC. ARGH... and the sport of it all really felt so ping pong <3
FURIOSA x2: 4.5/5. First of all fury road is perfect movie of all time and i'm sooo glad i saw it by myself in theatres back in 2015. furiosa is not quite perfect movie but i loved it. I WANT THEM BACK hit crazy for me bc that's literally something i've been turning over in my head trying to write recently even before seeing this... I want it back...
the one thing that didn't work for me as well was the choice of villain, or maybe its execution; the person receiving that line. everyone praising hemsworth for his portrayal just bc he's not doing thor for once... well um i would say actually sometimes he does still lean into the thor bit, that kind of clueless careless comedic air that he relies on to show dementus' absurdity/madness. and as s and i were discussing afterward, it's just not real enough... bit of a tangent but i love vengeance narratives bc they're essentially about a deeply intimate and personal relationship between two people who are tied together and in some ways the only people in the entire world who understand each other exactly, because of what one has taken from the other. i didn't feel like i got all that from dementus, or maybe hemsworth's portrayal of him. i could see the attempts being made but i wish he could have sold it more, that genuine twisted love he held for her, that recognition of himself and that desire to render her the same. What i'm saying is that chris hemsworth did not have it in him to play as crazy as i would have wanted from him so it was not as narratively satisfying for me :pensive:
anyway ive brought this up every time i talk about this movie but maybe my favourite moment and also the smallest thing ever is during the stowaway sequence (btw anyone else literally laugh in amazement and disbelief when they pulled out that motherfucking hang glider like the cherry on top of all the batshit insanity going on like ARE YOU FOR REALLLLL I LITERALLY LOVE MOVIES) when the mechanic is being sucked under the wheels of the rig and spots furiosa stowing away under the rig and just hands her the part needed to fix the engine, and she takes it, and he dies, and she goes and fixes it. god that was so perfect.
I SAW THE TV GLOW x2: ull never guess... yes another 4.5/5. idek how to talk about this movie or whether or not i even "love" it, whatever that means. what even is there to say--it speaks for itself. i burst into tears as soon as the credits rolled and cried the entire 30min drive home. not to be stupid but the second time i watched this was with v and afterward she turned to me and said, That conversation they had as teenagers on the high school bleachers, about not knowing who or what you like, about being empty inside... didn't we have that exact same conversation when we were in high school... and i was like Haha!!!!!
btw i found justice smith's performance crazy in this bc i got so used to seeing him in shitty garbage blockbusters like d&d and jurassic world or whateverthefuck... forgot i literally first knew him from THE GET DOWN... sorry i wasnt familiar with ur game etc. in the entire movie i can think of 2 times he smiled for real: first in the flashback when he was wearing the dress, and then in the bathroom cutting himself open and euphoric with relief and the confirmation of what he had always wondered, what he now knew. and then he closed himself back up again.
MAD MEN: ok not really but i did rewatch some s1 eps and like... jesus christ. mad men s1's just got everything! don draper being certifiably insane but it's like, for the first time, so it still feels fresh, before it gets old and you realize he isn't capable of change, of anything. the parallelisms of pete and peggy. pete failing miserably at blackmailing don but he actually had no idea he came soooo close to succeeding--WOULD have succeeded if not for menken telling don through tears You haven't thought this through! the real-time realization of This isn't what i want, you can't give me what i want, you're not who i wanted you to be... I don't even know who you are... YOU don't even know who you are. and him parroting it to pete--you haven't thought this through. also s1 betty bc all she had was her role of housewife and mother and she wasn't even GOOD at it, and she was just learning resentment and just realizing nothing she was promised meant anything at all. betty hates being a mother sooo bad but that's all she is, and in later seasons when she gets divorced finally it's like oh... so who even ARE you without that role? actually there's nothing going on at all! and it's horrible to watch. and the devastation of THE CAROUSEL, and fucking HARRY of all people having to burst out of the room crying as soon as the fantasy ends and the harsh white of reality flicks back on and nobody saying a word about it or ever bringing it up. end scene. end season.
watching mad men felt so refreshing and enthralling to me bc it really felt like there weren't "arcs". it was just life happening and breaking down and people going on or not. you could never know what the fuck would be going on in the next episode. nowadays it feels like a tv show is an 8 episode season and from the first episode you can already predict the overall shape of the story and character arcs, and everything is in service of that straightforward trajectory, every scene has to chug it along its path so you end up at the destination exactly. (probably most recent example coming foremost to my mind is fallout... what a nothing show that was lol.) and so in mad men whenever a scene hit you it hit you like a fucking truck, because it didn't feel like a culmination of a carefully plotted "arc" but an accumulation of that entire life, something you could never have foreseen just as the characters themselves could never have foreseen because they were living it, and at the same time felt so real and inevitable and natural. can't know if any of this is making sense at all. maybe i should rewatch mad men for real and make a dialogue compilation post... they say crazy shit on there all the time
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE: yeah i watched this over the course of like three days... i think this might actually beat out BLACK SAILS (which i must confess i never finished for some reason?!) for craziest and most dramatic show i have ever watched. literally every episode i am watching with my jaw dropped. the latest reveal of lestat's perspective of claudia's turning literally made me scream-gasp WHAT THE FUCK at the screen so like. um. tv is real u guys. rapidly becoming obsessed with what they're doing with UNRELIABLE NARRATION and MEMORY... s2e05 is my favourite episode obviously for all of that, but also for the life-affirmingness of it all, like maybe i actually wanna cry every time i think abt daniel saying But I like my life!, and also for armand relentlessly asking IS THAT WHAT MAKES YOU FASCINATING, for his quiet and merciless delivery of death. Jesus christ. but i also really loved s2e01 for that perfect louis and claudia ending scene... dialogue direction acting soundtrack said and unsaid everything firing on all cylinders in that perfect scene.
ONE PIECE: and now for something completely different. guys we're 2 seconds into egghead arc and it's already so much better than wano... why did i hate wano so much?! i actually could not stand most of the wano characters i'm sorry and you could tell wano arc took itself SO fucking seriously when it was not all that! like why did they have princess hiyori plot this revenge her whole fucking life and then at the last minute she can't do shit anyway jk i know why
stuff i liked from wano arc:
summer is starting. i'm not really writing anything but i have returned to a stupid little story i started when i was 16. deciding to write original stuff again doesn't sound groundbreaking unless u know me and the fact that i've been convincing myself out of it since i was 18. and when i say deciding this literally changed my life... ive been thinking a lot about cognitive dissonance lately. like how i decided i wouldnt bother ever writing original stuff bc, you know, writing fic on the side should be enough, and at the same time signed up for every creative writing workshop in undergrad without question bc i knew i needed them to survive or whatever
had a long convo with a about neurodivergence... Lol. a coming into this convo to ask me Hey have u ever considered if u might not be neurotypical and me coming into this convo to be like Hey do u think if i finally started dating this summer i'd finally be normal. it's funny to unpack it all with someone else because suddenly you're not just a dumb bitch telling yourself exactlyyy... personal tmi territory and also grossly oversimplifying for casual posting's sake but like me telling myself all my life I'm extremely neurotypical social situation understander :) and now having to be like well wait a minute but haven't i spent my entire life believing wholeheartedly that there is "something wrong" with me and obsessively picking apart all the offputting and unacceptable ways ive acted since i was a child and being immensely jealous of other people for being able to be "genuinely themselves" and always feeling "fake" for overcompensating to seem "normal" and suffering self-inflicted inescapably crushing loneliness for being secretly "wrong" or "different" or "insane" and for the knowledge that i will never truly be understood... What's going on here. Like where is this sense of social confidence and competence suddenly coming from. Is the incredibly normal social behaviour in the room with us right now
this year's already felt like it's had a lot of emotional upheaval and i'm in my late twenties feeling like maybe i didn't know anything at all and there's still so much to learn and understand and there's so much to grieve and so much that's different and will never be the same. maybe the least alone i ever felt in my life was during those precious years when my friends were all still friends with each other and living felt like dying but at least there was them. But what did we know really and what did we understand. and even saying it is rewriting it, and even saying it i know it's not true. i miss it so much but i understand that what i have now is stronger and deeper in so many ways even if it's not necessarily always the way i want. at the same time there's so much to appreciate and so much to come to terms with, and to figure out how i want to come to terms with it. but past everything i'm immensely grateful for every attempt to understand, to reach out halfway, that i have been lucky enough to be on the receiving end of, s when the second grader next to u acted like an online stalker freak and you just decided to roll with it and respond, p when you spoke to me in the language only we both understood and i left you unanswered, v for asking, v for listening to every silence, v when i told you about the poem, a for seeing straight through me. thank you for seeing straight through me.
this week i went camping at a campsite four hours away and drove for much of the way there and back. i hate driving and can't park a car to save my life but driving down the highways in the mountains by forests and lakes going 110km/hr speed limit while singing along to music is actually kinda fun maybe they were onto something there. i mean until my neck starts hurting but you know. i'm really lucky to live where i live. honestly i'm not one of god's campers but it is really nice once in a while to chill by a campfire and fall asleep listening to the sounds of a lake and wake up at 5 am with the world quiet and bright...
speaking of music, some top picks from albums lately:
TIGERS BLOOD - waxahatchee: 3 sisters, evil spawn, ice cold, right back to it, bored, lone star lake, 365. so excited to see waxahatchee in aug with s because saint cloud + this album are genuinely becoming two of my all-timers. tweet thats like "What the fuck is waxahatchee talking about but also exactly". take my money i don't work that hard... so true
BRAT - charli xcx: everything is romantic, 365, b2b, talk talk, sympathy is a knife, von dutch, girl so confusing lorde remix which saved the song btw. i'll be honest this album is no hifn or pop2 for me but i'm really happy for her + the acclaim she's getting this era. i also think it's so funny listening to 365 on the way to work at 7am every morning like dont sleep dont eat just do it on repeat yeah...
WHAT A DEVASTATING TURN OF EVENTS - rachel chinouriri: the hills, never need me, my everything, all i ever asked, my blood, cold call... basically the entire album lmfao. listened to this after a random tweet on my fyp listed this as their top album this year and kind of became obsessed from first listen.
THE RISE AND FALL OF A MIDWEST PRINCESS - chappell roan: femininomenon, red wine supernova, naked in manhattan. yes i checked out this album after her meteoric rise and the first time i heard that first prechorus in naked in manhattan i literally teared up... the pure distilled emotion of her voice delivering i wanna know baby what is it like. i cannot sing good luck babe to save my life btw and actually trying it on my roadtrip was the most humbling experience ever
shoutout also to movie soundtracks, specifically CHALLENGERS and I SAW THE TV GLOW. from the latter i really loved caroline polachek's starburned and unkissed, yeule's cover of anthems for a 17yo girl, and moonlight by the weather station. also, this track that plays in the planetarium scene, you know the one.
quick gauntlet of movies i either hated or loved. there is no in-between:
MAY DECEMBER: 4.5/5. loved the character work, the acting, the cold horror of the ending. grasping for meaning, grasping for art, and for what. movies that actually made me physically tense. "this is just what grown-ups do."
POOR THINGS: 2/5. i'm an emma stone enjoyer but this was the barbie movie of the oscar gauntlet last year for me. took so long and to say what? ending so cartoonish i literally could not believe my eyes
PAST LIVES: 2/5. i always had a feeling i wouldn't like this movie but watched it anyway to pleasantly surprise myself... well that did not happen :( i'm generally an enjoyer of childhood friends/missed connections but this movie did nothing for me. came across overly sentimental, even cliched, without feeling earned. her ending walk thru the city earned back a whole star for me though.
BONES AND ALL: 4/5. ultimately didn't like the use of a "villain" character as it felt a little forced to allow for the ending. i would have preferred for him to remain a one-off, as an entry/gatekeeper into a new world, if you will. but i really loved the attention paid to objects in this movie, if that makes any sense at all... the physicality of the mundane, the beautiful. those flashes that would sometimes run through a character's mind as they lay half-asleep in a dream, and that was all we would get... i was enthralled!! also perhaps one of the most horrifying mother-daughter scenes in all of fiction, which is REALLY saying something.
ALL OF US STRANGERS: 2/5. sorry but this movie actually kinda pissed me off... again i love themes of aloneness, being unable to move on from grief, the hope/horror of fantasy, but this story or maybe its execution reallyyy did not work for me. all of it just to be like "damn... hurt people hurt people 😔" are u for serious rn... yes i cried during the scene where his dad apologizes for not checking up on him as a kid when he was crying alone in his room like ofc i get it but as a letterboxd review i saw put it, ok somebody's been doing inner child healing in therapy but that does not a whole movie make... overall found this corny rather than moving but i do seem to be in the minority here so maybe it just wasn't for me.
CHALLENGERS x2: 4.5/5 we are soo back. everyones already talked this movie to death and i have nothing to add other than yes i loved it. i think the part that gets me the most is actually the gum parallel. like i actually flinched like i was shot the first time i saw it. which btw is a testament to the strength of the NON LINEAR NARRATIVE <3 to have him do it with tashi at the start is like ok intimacy ok rituals love it then to go back thirteen years and see him do it with patrick and everything SHIFTED. SEISMIC. ARGH... and the sport of it all really felt so ping pong <3
FURIOSA x2: 4.5/5. First of all fury road is perfect movie of all time and i'm sooo glad i saw it by myself in theatres back in 2015. furiosa is not quite perfect movie but i loved it. I WANT THEM BACK hit crazy for me bc that's literally something i've been turning over in my head trying to write recently even before seeing this... I want it back...
the one thing that didn't work for me as well was the choice of villain, or maybe its execution; the person receiving that line. everyone praising hemsworth for his portrayal just bc he's not doing thor for once... well um i would say actually sometimes he does still lean into the thor bit, that kind of clueless careless comedic air that he relies on to show dementus' absurdity/madness. and as s and i were discussing afterward, it's just not real enough... bit of a tangent but i love vengeance narratives bc they're essentially about a deeply intimate and personal relationship between two people who are tied together and in some ways the only people in the entire world who understand each other exactly, because of what one has taken from the other. i didn't feel like i got all that from dementus, or maybe hemsworth's portrayal of him. i could see the attempts being made but i wish he could have sold it more, that genuine twisted love he held for her, that recognition of himself and that desire to render her the same. What i'm saying is that chris hemsworth did not have it in him to play as crazy as i would have wanted from him so it was not as narratively satisfying for me :pensive:
anyway ive brought this up every time i talk about this movie but maybe my favourite moment and also the smallest thing ever is during the stowaway sequence (btw anyone else literally laugh in amazement and disbelief when they pulled out that motherfucking hang glider like the cherry on top of all the batshit insanity going on like ARE YOU FOR REALLLLL I LITERALLY LOVE MOVIES) when the mechanic is being sucked under the wheels of the rig and spots furiosa stowing away under the rig and just hands her the part needed to fix the engine, and she takes it, and he dies, and she goes and fixes it. god that was so perfect.
I SAW THE TV GLOW x2: ull never guess... yes another 4.5/5. idek how to talk about this movie or whether or not i even "love" it, whatever that means. what even is there to say--it speaks for itself. i burst into tears as soon as the credits rolled and cried the entire 30min drive home. not to be stupid but the second time i watched this was with v and afterward she turned to me and said, That conversation they had as teenagers on the high school bleachers, about not knowing who or what you like, about being empty inside... didn't we have that exact same conversation when we were in high school... and i was like Haha!!!!!
btw i found justice smith's performance crazy in this bc i got so used to seeing him in shitty garbage blockbusters like d&d and jurassic world or whateverthefuck... forgot i literally first knew him from THE GET DOWN... sorry i wasnt familiar with ur game etc. in the entire movie i can think of 2 times he smiled for real: first in the flashback when he was wearing the dress, and then in the bathroom cutting himself open and euphoric with relief and the confirmation of what he had always wondered, what he now knew. and then he closed himself back up again.
tv thoughts. yeah i watch television or whatever.
MAD MEN: ok not really but i did rewatch some s1 eps and like... jesus christ. mad men s1's just got everything! don draper being certifiably insane but it's like, for the first time, so it still feels fresh, before it gets old and you realize he isn't capable of change, of anything. the parallelisms of pete and peggy. pete failing miserably at blackmailing don but he actually had no idea he came soooo close to succeeding--WOULD have succeeded if not for menken telling don through tears You haven't thought this through! the real-time realization of This isn't what i want, you can't give me what i want, you're not who i wanted you to be... I don't even know who you are... YOU don't even know who you are. and him parroting it to pete--you haven't thought this through. also s1 betty bc all she had was her role of housewife and mother and she wasn't even GOOD at it, and she was just learning resentment and just realizing nothing she was promised meant anything at all. betty hates being a mother sooo bad but that's all she is, and in later seasons when she gets divorced finally it's like oh... so who even ARE you without that role? actually there's nothing going on at all! and it's horrible to watch. and the devastation of THE CAROUSEL, and fucking HARRY of all people having to burst out of the room crying as soon as the fantasy ends and the harsh white of reality flicks back on and nobody saying a word about it or ever bringing it up. end scene. end season.
watching mad men felt so refreshing and enthralling to me bc it really felt like there weren't "arcs". it was just life happening and breaking down and people going on or not. you could never know what the fuck would be going on in the next episode. nowadays it feels like a tv show is an 8 episode season and from the first episode you can already predict the overall shape of the story and character arcs, and everything is in service of that straightforward trajectory, every scene has to chug it along its path so you end up at the destination exactly. (probably most recent example coming foremost to my mind is fallout... what a nothing show that was lol.) and so in mad men whenever a scene hit you it hit you like a fucking truck, because it didn't feel like a culmination of a carefully plotted "arc" but an accumulation of that entire life, something you could never have foreseen just as the characters themselves could never have foreseen because they were living it, and at the same time felt so real and inevitable and natural. can't know if any of this is making sense at all. maybe i should rewatch mad men for real and make a dialogue compilation post... they say crazy shit on there all the time
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE: yeah i watched this over the course of like three days... i think this might actually beat out BLACK SAILS (which i must confess i never finished for some reason?!) for craziest and most dramatic show i have ever watched. literally every episode i am watching with my jaw dropped. the latest reveal of lestat's perspective of claudia's turning literally made me scream-gasp WHAT THE FUCK at the screen so like. um. tv is real u guys. rapidly becoming obsessed with what they're doing with UNRELIABLE NARRATION and MEMORY... s2e05 is my favourite episode obviously for all of that, but also for the life-affirmingness of it all, like maybe i actually wanna cry every time i think abt daniel saying But I like my life!, and also for armand relentlessly asking IS THAT WHAT MAKES YOU FASCINATING, for his quiet and merciless delivery of death. Jesus christ. but i also really loved s2e01 for that perfect louis and claudia ending scene... dialogue direction acting soundtrack said and unsaid everything firing on all cylinders in that perfect scene.
ONE PIECE: and now for something completely different. guys we're 2 seconds into egghead arc and it's already so much better than wano... why did i hate wano so much?! i actually could not stand most of the wano characters i'm sorry and you could tell wano arc took itself SO fucking seriously when it was not all that! like why did they have princess hiyori plot this revenge her whole fucking life and then at the last minute she can't do shit anyway jk i know why
stuff i liked from wano arc:
- not technically wano arc but PERONA DEPARTING FROM MIHAWK'S ISLAND I CRIEDDDD
- Absalom dying for real... the evil is defeated [ignoring blackbeard getting stronger in the distance]
- luffy getting retraumatized by seeing half his crew seemingly get vaporized in front of him
- law getting jerked around like a ragdoll bc no one will listen to him or his very sensible plans as usual
- SANJI MAGICAL GIRL TRANSFORMATION... WITH A COST... BITCH!
- kid + killer arc. zoro killer fight. killer REVEAL. Actually screamed a little at those brief kid backstory sketches btw.
- climactic battles obviously... gear 5... kidlaw teamup... robin finally revealing her levelup move...
- the strongest character to come out of wano arc imo was momonosuke, which makes sense bc he's probably the most narratively important wano character. the payoff of his character arc and themes were overall well done and i almost cried in his goodbye episode
- yes the animation got CRAZY it's true
+
summer is starting. i'm not really writing anything but i have returned to a stupid little story i started when i was 16. deciding to write original stuff again doesn't sound groundbreaking unless u know me and the fact that i've been convincing myself out of it since i was 18. and when i say deciding this literally changed my life... ive been thinking a lot about cognitive dissonance lately. like how i decided i wouldnt bother ever writing original stuff bc, you know, writing fic on the side should be enough, and at the same time signed up for every creative writing workshop in undergrad without question bc i knew i needed them to survive or whatever
had a long convo with a about neurodivergence... Lol. a coming into this convo to ask me Hey have u ever considered if u might not be neurotypical and me coming into this convo to be like Hey do u think if i finally started dating this summer i'd finally be normal. it's funny to unpack it all with someone else because suddenly you're not just a dumb bitch telling yourself exactlyyy... personal tmi territory and also grossly oversimplifying for casual posting's sake but like me telling myself all my life I'm extremely neurotypical social situation understander :) and now having to be like well wait a minute but haven't i spent my entire life believing wholeheartedly that there is "something wrong" with me and obsessively picking apart all the offputting and unacceptable ways ive acted since i was a child and being immensely jealous of other people for being able to be "genuinely themselves" and always feeling "fake" for overcompensating to seem "normal" and suffering self-inflicted inescapably crushing loneliness for being secretly "wrong" or "different" or "insane" and for the knowledge that i will never truly be understood... What's going on here. Like where is this sense of social confidence and competence suddenly coming from. Is the incredibly normal social behaviour in the room with us right now
this year's already felt like it's had a lot of emotional upheaval and i'm in my late twenties feeling like maybe i didn't know anything at all and there's still so much to learn and understand and there's so much to grieve and so much that's different and will never be the same. maybe the least alone i ever felt in my life was during those precious years when my friends were all still friends with each other and living felt like dying but at least there was them. But what did we know really and what did we understand. and even saying it is rewriting it, and even saying it i know it's not true. i miss it so much but i understand that what i have now is stronger and deeper in so many ways even if it's not necessarily always the way i want. at the same time there's so much to appreciate and so much to come to terms with, and to figure out how i want to come to terms with it. but past everything i'm immensely grateful for every attempt to understand, to reach out halfway, that i have been lucky enough to be on the receiving end of, s when the second grader next to u acted like an online stalker freak and you just decided to roll with it and respond, p when you spoke to me in the language only we both understood and i left you unanswered, v for asking, v for listening to every silence, v when i told you about the poem, a for seeing straight through me. thank you for seeing straight through me.