#it also gets really fucking exhausting to constantly hear people talking about something fundamental to me

[caffeinatedopossum]

People are so weird to trans people. Like beyond being straight forward dickheads, transphobes are just so weird

#even some people who arent necessarily malicious but maybe just ignorant tend to be so weird #i just saw a post from a lesbian (presumably a terf) complaining about trans woman #because 'i like woman. how am i expected to be attracted to trans woman if no look like woman??? hmm?' #maybe this is also just hard for me to understand as an asexual person trying to understand allosexual people but #but like wtf? idk who is demanding you to be attracted to ALL women but it certainly isnt me #you can be a lesbian who doesnt like all women...? some women is plenty tbh #you dont have to tear apart another persons (an entire demographics-woth of people actually) self esteem #to have the sexuality that you have #as a trans person who isnt cis passing i can tell you. we KNOW. We KNOW we dont look cis to you #you do not have to remind us that our bodies dont fit into your culturally conceptualized ideals for gender #it also gets really fucking exhausting to constantly hear people talking about something fundamental to me #as some sort of compromise at best #its something i can relate to with my asexuality too #either love me for who i am or leave me the hell alone

[graygrams]

The Anxiety of Allowing Yourself to Love

Being in love and loving somebody is a beautiful thing. It is also an incredibly raw, overwhelming and vulnerable state of being. As someone who does not often fall in love, the intensity of the love I feel is somewhat heightened, and it can be a blessing and a curse in so many ways.

Anxiety is unfortunately something that I have had to deal with since my early teenage years. It’s become such a fundamental aspect to my life that I genuinely cannot understand how people do not suffer from the same debilitating thoughts as I do, and it makes me angry that I make myself suffer so much because of it.

But I also remember that five years ago, I was physically unable to present in front of a class, or answer a teacher’s questions without bursting into tears, and now I get praised on my speech giving and presentation skills.

My relationship with anxiety has changed - it’s become less about social anxiety and more about paranoia, and this is a slight improvement. However, it came to my attention when I was talking to my friends who are also in happy relationships about my fears and thoughts on mine, and I asked them if they ever thought like that too - to which they all denied. It’s what made me realise that despite my progress, anxiety still controls aspects of my life.

To gush about my current relationship, I am currently very much in love with my girlfriend Emily who has completely taken over every aspect of my life - something which I am perfectly happy with. She is everything I could ever want in a partner, and it almost feels like a dream that I managed to find someone as perfect as her. We are still very much in our honeymoon phase (1 and a half months of it so far!) and it’s made my life so much richer and more worth living than before - everything I do I want to tell her about, and I want to spend every waking second in her company because quite frankly, I can’t get enough.

There are times when my mind is a cruel and dark place, and I have been no stranger to the feeling in the last few years. But finally being in a happy relationship - and therefore a happier state of mind - makes the cruelty of my anxiety less bearable and more painful. And let me tell you, it’s fucking awful.

It can happen at any time. Most recently I was walking around Morrisons doing shopping for my mum, and a thought crept into my mind. 

“You’re not good enough for her.” Oh no, I thought. Here comes another wave of feelings I don’t quite want to deal with in the middle of the pasta aisle at 7pm. 

“She will find someone better than you.” I can hear it getting louder in my head and it gets harder to ignore. 

“She will leave you, you are not good enough to make her stay.” it chokes me at this point, and I begin to cough uncontrollably in public (making the situation 10x worse because now people are pissed I’m coughing on the farfalle). 

I’ve found that physically shaking my head helps me get the thoughts out of my mind. So I do that. I then proceed to the fruit aisle desperately counting the fruit to take my mind off it. And gradually I begin to think of other things.

Night time is the worst time for it. I dread sleeping until I am extremely tired as I dread lying awake with only my thoughts to keep me company. Two nights ago I made that mistake and ended up an uncontrollable mess at 2am because I let my thoughts get the best of me, and it’s suffocating. It is debilitating. My irrational insecurity (which I believe stem from my past relationship which did not end well) in terms of relationships often takes away from the feeling of happiness I get when I think of my girlfriend. I trust her with my whole heart (which I will admit is a feeling I did not get in my past relationship, so I have myself to blame there) and yet I constantly worry I won’t be enough for her. She would never ever cheat, and yet I panic whenever she goes out for the night, gets drunk, or isn’t with me because it’s how it happened last time - and it’s fucking disrespectful that I would ever think she would do that to me. I get irrationally jealous and upset at the mention of a past lover because I worry she wants them over me, because again it’s what happened last time. I just can’t help it and the thoughts don’t seem to go away no matter how many times I tell myself she really loves me and won’t hurt me. It’s enough to make me go insane.

My last relationship was meaningless in comparison to this one - it wasn’t love, and it wasn’t anything close to love - and yet I still can’t recall being hurt that badly since that had happened. I never thought that I’d still be seeing the effects of it 5 years after, but alas. Then again, I believe that even if it hadn’t happened, I would still be torturing myself with these thoughts. The main point is I am insecure in my own abilities and worth. I wonder if there will come a day where I finally believe I am enough, but it seems unrealistic and distant - more like a dream.

All in all, my mind is a pile of shit to me sometimes. I know my thoughts are irrational and I often talk myself off the ledge, but it’s exhausting constantly having to battle yourself for everything good that happens in your life. My girlfriend is incredible to me, and I don’t know how she copes with my anxiety riddled brain sometimes. I don’t know what to give her as advice either - maybe google can help. “How to support your girlfriend who is a ball of anxiety 24/7”? Either way, I love her and I trust her. 100%. She is the light of my life currently and I look forward to every moment I get to spend talking to her or being with her. It just sucks that she and I both have to deal with my anxiety which is constantly trying to sabotage the only good thing in my life right now.

Rant over. It’s hard to come up with conclusions for these…essays? But what I’ve said what I’ve wanted to say. As usual I doubt many people read these, but if you happen to, any advice on shooing the nasty voices away would be greatly appreciated, as would potential advice I could give to Emily for coping with my antics. Til the next time,

llg.

#anxiety #mine #post #ramble #relationship

[boobtubedude]

My Top 10 Shows Of 2017

Hi. Here’s a top ten list. People like these, right? 

Close But Not Quite: GLOW, Speechless, Insecure, One Day At A Time, Brooklyn Nine-Nine 

So what’s 2017 been about? Not about TV, really. Not for me. Hasn’t been the focus. It’s been there, like it always has, but not in the same what. What was an omnipresent obsession turned into something else. It didn’t go away, but it transformed, mutated, evolved, got pushed to the back. But what stuck really stuck, not really programs but lifelines, ways to make sense of senselessness, to realize there was a point to all of this. I didn’t watch nearly as much TV as I had in recent years, but taking a step back meant everything had to count. It had to mean something. It couldn’t be a way to pass the time but a way to define how I should spend it.

10) Wynonna Earp

It was a year in which listening meant more than speaking, when shutting the fuck up was more valuable than trying to articulate anything. Mansplaining my way through this calendar year, whether consciously or inadvertently, would have been the bad way to go. So it was more about looking for blind spots, having them displayed in ways that made me rethink what it meant to be not just a critic but a citizen. Being the former without the latter just means you’re an outsider observer rather than an active participant. Supporting voices that had been screaming to be heard was more important than sharing my own. Even a list like this is probably bullshit, but that’s why I’m not really talking about the shows at all.

9) Jane The Virgin

The shows are important, obviously. They are more than just TV shows but reflections of what’s possible. You can judge shows by how closely they reflect reality and how close they envision how life SHOULD IN FACT BE. I’m not sure there’s a right or wrong way to approach the medium. I do know that shows that simply state how futile it is to do anything other than what’s in one’s own self-interest are lazy and terrible and fairly close to immoral in this stage in history. We all know that life sucks. We won’t need a show to only remind us of that. We need shows that remind us that there’s light in the darkness, that there are options, that happiness is a possibility even when we can’t see it for ourselves.

8) Chris Gethard: Career Suicide

We need to know that other people feel as terribly as we do, and that doesn’t make it freaks but rather makes us human. The idea that we have to hide those kinds of thoughts and vulnerabilities for fear of shame or ridicule cripples us more than we know, and I know this because I’m only this year realizing how long I’ve been this miserable. I chalked it up to “normal” Irish-Catholic upbringing, something that was not worthy of even discussing because relative to so many it’s so fine that it’s not worth even mentioning. And while there are obviously a lot of degrees to this, I chose to just suck it all in for the first 40+ years of my life rather than even contemplate the fact that my left foot taps incessantly for almost every moment of every day I’m awake. I’m constantly aware of how anxiety-ridden and unhappy I am. The very idea of having to go out to meet people at an event I agreed to go to stresses me out, even while being at home all the time makes me wonder why I have so few friends. I can intellectually rationalize the insanity of that contradiction, but I live it all the same. The best stuff on TV doesn’t offer a solution to any of that, but lets me know I’m not alone.

7) American Vandal 

We get stuck in routines. We get defined by what others think of us, which in turn reinforces actions that fit that description. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince strangers online that I’m a certain type of person, and that has calcified around someone I’d both like to be and mostly hate. All writing is performative to some extent, and it doesn’t matter if I do it in 140 characters or 5,000 words, it’s all a performance to some extent. You don’t see the crusty-eyed, hairy, smelly weirdo that’s typing any of this on his phone or his laptop. You don’t know me, because I don’t want you to, even though some part of me absolutely positively wishes you did. If you ever wondered if it’s exhausting being a narcissist with crippling low-self esteem, let me tell you: It is. 

6) Twin Peaks: The Return

Nothing about this year makes any sense, which means that absurdity often reveals more than “real” life ever could. I’m a lapsed Catholic, so the idea of a God watching over everything seems peculiar, but I’ve never lost faith in the idea that there’s more than just the stuff that happens before we shuffle off our mortal coil. We’re connected to something, whatever it is, because without that connection we’re truly in an abyss. People that do the right thing should be judged differently than those that don’t, and I like the idea that the cosmos has some way of addressing that. Whether that’s through mathematics or morality, I can’t say. But we all sense there’s senselessness just around the corner, and even while that’s mighty tempting at times, there’s a fundamental need for order at the heart of existence that transcends mortgages, commuting to work, and the busyness of everyday life. That meaning is reflected on the inside of our eyelids, played across a screen that becomes impossibly vast once we go to sleep. It’s hard to literally interpret, but it’s there all the same.

5) The Good Place 

Actions have consequences. As they should. The rising fear in 2017 centered around the idea that causality had been flung into space, a vestigial element of a life that no longer existed. Actions that once had consequences no longer seemed to have any, and the entire agreement between earthly citizen had seemingly been eradicated by those for who shame had been surgically removed. We all knew things were bad, but there seemed to be no mechanism by which to compel those that didn’t feel like abiding by the normal rules of nature to do so. Once that reality set in, nothing felt real, and action after action buried the actions before those. What was strange was how…familiar everything felt, even while nothing was the same. The post-apocalyptic fantasies gave way to benign realities: We still did more or less the same things while also feeling like it mattered less than ever before, or that by doing the same thing we were perpetuating the problem. Hashtags only get you so far. Many of us marched in January but were exhausted by June. We might as well have been arguing with the tides.

4) Review 

What’s fascinating about making a bad decision, or indulging in a dark thought, can perpetuate itself and create its own logic loop from which it’s nearly impossible to escape. So people double down on a bad decision rather than admit it was one, and before long you’re so far down the wrong path that finding your way back to the main road is impossible. Mounting evidence of error yields entrenchment, resistance, and a further erosion of trust in anyone else that doesn’t march in lockstep with your worldview. At some point, objectivity turns into a quaint idea, and you can go insane so slowly that you don’t realize that you’ve been scrolling through tweets for the last ninety minutes because the onslaught of bullshit isn’t stopping but in fact picking up speed. There’s a self-perpetuating cycle with enough power to light up the entire United States but instead might just engulf it in flames. Driving off the cliff becomes preferable to looking in the rearview mirror at all you’ve lost on the way to the precipice. We’re ultimately and irrevocably alone in the bubble we’ve built for ourselves.

3) Better Things

That’s not true, but that’s how it felt for a lot of the year for many of us. I have the lottery ticket of life as a straight white American male, and if I felt this bad this year, I can’t begin to imagine a tenth of a tenth of what it was like for anyone else. That doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy, but I can’t pretend to have empathy in a way that’s meaningful for anyone but myself to hear. The world is profoundly different than in was in 2016, but much of that change doesn’t come from something suddenly introduced so much as suddenly pushed into discussion. These aspects of life have always been here, and while it shouldn’t be a surprise to so many to hear them uttered, it is all the same. In that dissonance is opportunity: opportunity for those able to articulate what’s been under an unfortunate cloud for so long to speak out loud in voices both defiant but also hopeful. These are voices that show both an ugly truth but also a better way. These are voices that, now introduced, cannot and should never be silenced again. 

2) BoJack Horseman

Instagram is a fairly new app, but the idea of papering over one’s less-than-ideal qualities has been around for, well, forever. We collectively decide we’re not going to talk about it, and we bottle it up, and then we slowly go bald and fat. Or so I hear. I wouldn’t know anything about that, with my luscious locks and 30’’ waistline. 2017 was, for me, a year in which I realized just how corrosive that rot was within myself, how much I was talking about everything other than what was on my mind, with TV a great way to talk about “important” things without having to deal with my own shit. “Of course everyone knows I’m writing about me,” I’d tell myself, usually after a few drinks, and yet I doubt anyone knew or anyone even cared to consider that option. I speak to 28,000 strangers a day on Twitter and have maybe three friends in my life. My family and I love each other and also are the primary sources of our respective problems. I have a wife that used to see me at my best and now usually sees me at my most exhausted. I didn’t see any of this as a problem because I thought I was too privileged to have problems. That doesn’t mean my problems are equal or more or less than anyone else’s. I’m not trying to lump myself in with anyone or anything. I’m just here and realizing how miserable here is and realizing it’s OK to admit that it’s not OK. I don’t know what the fuck to do with this information a month after my forty-second birthday, but it’s still something akin to a breakthrough for someone that’s really good at analyzing theme in narrative television and absolutely awful at looking at the themes that consistently undermine my attempts at anything approximating consistent happiness.

1) The Leftovers

Recently I came across a bunch of handwritten report cards from my high school that my folks saved for me. Each one said something along the lines of, “I don’t know how Ryan does all the things he does and still excels.” These were wonderful things to right and absolutely cursed me to viewing any moment of inactivity as a wasted moment on the path to death. If I wasn’t being productive in some capacity, I was throwing away a chance to maximize my life, as if life was something to be conquered rather than experienced. That message carried through into college, and into my 20s, and once writing about TV became a possibility, drove me through a decade in which I worked on average about 10-14 hours a day. When I took vacations from my day job, I took the opportunity to just do more writing, watch more screeners, do more podcasts. I was here, but I wasn’t here. Not in a meaningful way. I was an outline more than a fully fleshed-out figure. Recently, I’ve been using my weekends to do anything other than something productive. Stepping off the treadmill is antithetical to my nature, and something that I’m admittedly not comfortable doing. I spent so much time wondering what people I’ve never met thought of my writing and almost no time wondering how it’s been a year since I’ve seen cousins that live ten miles away. Television taught me a lot for the past decade, and introduced me to a host of super smart people that did more for me than they’ll ever know. But looking at that screen (and the second screen, for that matter) for this long has come at a cost: It took way too long to see it, but it’s maybe not too late to do something about it.  These shows all helped me get to this place in my life, which is why they are my top ten shows of the year.

[captaindoubled]

Me, the person that spent the last years at college studying and researching evaluation conditioning in the media and how it affects people's feelings towards different races irl: Even though media is getting better, folks are still falling into harmful tropes that only harm the message they are trying to get across and it helping.

I love Akande in overwatch but he is still a hulking black villain and that only reinforces the black hulking stereotype. Evaluative condition g is quick and instant and on a subconscious level for the most part so when folks look at him, they make connections with the racist stereotype of a big black man even if his character is far from it.

Dream Daddy has trans representation but has had their name tacked on to transphobic gamers and regardless of their involvement, that association is there. Gay men will be played as a joke because viewers of these gamers will be primed to think of gay men as a joke and not nuisanced people.

VLD relies so heavily on character tropes that genuine moments of character growth are lost because viewers are only going to see them through those tropes. Example- Characters like Hunk have moments where he shines through as an individual in the show are lost because the viewers have already been told multiple times that he's a fat food guy coward and because this trope is old and connections are strong in people's head that this trope is easily recognizable, moments where he's brave, math clever and just kind are overshadowed even if those moments are even with his food moments.

Steven Universe is another show that I had a lot of hope for but ultimately i had to step back from entirely because they constantly did nothing about their anti black biases and continued to demonize or other black coded characters within the show. Black woman characters being mules for the feelings of other characters, even when they were given moments to deal with those problems were turned to moments to lift up another character in the end (When Pearl used Garnet to fuse to feel powerful but only ended up being a character development moment for Pearl when that story arch should have centered around Garnet carrying the burden of the team). The creators have refused to do better with the POC coded gems or POC characters in the town and have mostly focused on white coded or thin characters. This is an example of people trying to be progressive so much so that they don't stop to check themselves or allow themselves to be criticized which is a shame. It's hard to see the progress in media when half the time it's one step forward two steps back.

Also me, but an optimistic person who just wants to have a good time and have faith in folks: I still enjoy the characters of Overwatch and other actually diverse big name pieces of media and even with its flaws it's a step in the right direction. The flaws will help them learn and if it doesn't, the spite will fuel other people to do better with their own IPs. I've seen plenty of folk get on their grind from bad media just as much as good media. And within the full context of the story, Akande is more than just a big black man and if fans and folks don't see the humanity in him, that's their problem. It is the job of the creators to do what they can to not promote harmful stereotypes but if fans can not see humanity in black characters than there is little that can be done.

Example- Lució is a good man, a musician and a hero to his people but people either Demonize his character by saying his a criminal for stealing from an oppressive force or dehumanizing him because he's one of the shortest characters on canon and because they don't see him as a "threatening" black man, they find ways to make him even less threatening, almost infant like as a counter stereotype which is just as harmful to black people.

I will bring up Dream Daddy again because other than small moments that are iffy, the game is actually very tame and very well made and not the fetish fuel that the fans have made it out to be. Most of the dates are just friends hanging out and only on the third date do you lock in a romantic interaction. Some of those last dates don't even become romantic until the last minute. Even Joseph's story which doesn't have a "good ending" is balanced for in the fact that not every gay has to have a good end when the majority of them in the story do. Only positive stuff doesn't make people see gay men as complex human people and the idea that just because it's a dating sim, huh can't always get what you want is nice and treats him like a human man with his own issues and not just fan fuel. I can see this being a stepping stone for folks to take the dating sim genre more seriously because both them and visual novels are easier to program and create than fps,third person games, or side scroller and so more indie folks can create bigger and better representation without being tacked on to the Game Grumps.

VLD has been an odd show from the jump and has done a lot better than previous versions of the show. It's far more diverse and the stereotypes are annoying but not as bad as they were in the past. I prefer to watch the show outside of the fandom and I don't interact with the fans because again, it becomes a situation where the fans own biases have soiled the entire experience and made the show something that it isn't. It could be better but nothing is perfect and I'll critique it because that's my job as a viewer but I'm still proud of the work it's done so far even if it's not super good all the time.

Also also me, an exhausted person: Just do better. Both shows and fans. People make these shows and pieces of media and people aren't perfect. It's both the job of the creator to do better and to apologize when implicit biases, which are very hard to change unless you actively go out of the way to fix them and recondition yourself, are present in characters or they just fuck up on something.

But it's also the job of the fans to educate themselves on what's right and how to interact with folk. This isn't a reasonably, be nice thing. It's a, maybe don't send really weird messages to folks about your ship unless the creator has made it know that they like to engage in that talk. Even if you are angry, actually say what's wrong with sources instead of working off hear-say. If you don't know what's wrong with a show, ask and do your own research or only form your opinions from folks that actually did the research and not a random post with literally no sources but lots of outrage. Also accept that sometimes your opinion on stuff is wrong. Cis women who only interact with a show for the gay ships are fundamentally wrong?? And annoying and you hounding a creators for gay content is actually very gross when you can support shows when canon can characters.

BUT as fans you do have a right to critique a show for stuff going on and creators have to have thicker skin when it comes to critique. They have every choice to listen to it or ignore it but fans have every right to critique the media. It's how things change. Again, a point back to Steven Universe. Both with the fans and the creators didn't want anything bad said about the show. Just because it was progressive for one group, doesn't mean it's progressive for other folk.

There were good moments that children and adults needed to hear but nothing is perfect and if a show can't be critiqued nothing will get better and the deeper in your craw you get about a problem, folks tend to double down on them (I have a theory that racist/sexist/ist thoughts and actions tend to get worst when you tell folks to stop because they can be learned through conditioning and so go through a thing called an extinction burst ((an extinction burst is when you try and stop a trained behavior by not reinforcing it any longer the thing doing the behavior does it a lot more out of frustration because they aren't frying their treat anymore)) so they do racist shit more because they aren't getting rewarded for their behavior) the worst you'll get.

The rise of social media and creators wanting to connect with the fans have created a situation where folks have easy access to one another and there is a lack or respect for folks space. This was a problem with Bryke and members of the ATLA crew entering in spaces meant for the fans and being upset with how overwhelming the close interactions were and got defensive about critique of any kind. This is a problem with folks on the VLD fandom holding pieces of media hostage to get what they want, ignoring the real world consequences of those actions. The closeness allows for direct responses with problems but also the same way texts are, people expect and answer immediately when people behind contracts and are representing their content and everyone who's worked on it has to put the message out fast but same time it has to follow rules probably set out by their company. Both sides just need to do better.

#my meds kicked in half way through so this was longer than planned lol