I like to write to keep myself occupied, especially during slow stretches at the office. It’s a little less distracting than visiting neighbours’ desks to chat, and I’m still a little iffy about using Microsoft Teams for anything but work-related matters, especially when it’s someone I don’t know well enough for the conversation to flow. I don’t want to disturb anyone anyway. There are only so many make-work projects I can do, and I can only stand looking at the same websites over and over a few times; the longer I scroll on the socials, the more it exhausts me.
A lot of the time there’s something I want to communicate in my posts, but the truth is that this drive also tends to drag me into perfectionism and creative blocks. Maybe it’s leftover conditioning from writing term papers in university, where the fear of not making sense or missing a citation would paralyze me into blowing due dates. I know it was just my AuDHD brain telling me “if I don’t say something perfectly this time, I fail.”, but if I knew how to get around it back then, I would definitely have had a better GPA.
Even when I do get past the inertia, I rush to get things published; maybe I worry that I’ll lose the immediacy of whatever feeling I’m trying to write about if I let it rest for a bit. I haven’t been letting myself enjoy the process of playing around with sentences and paragraphs, refining until I’m (somewhat) satisfied. I’ve also come to learn that my mind’s also a lot clearer in the morning; the afternoon is when the brain starts to fuzz over and it gets too frustrating to attempt any type of expression.
I just read Lane Moore’s You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships as an Adult. There’s quite a lot of good information and advice, and I found it resonated with my own experience.
I sometimes wonder whether I should make more of an effort to befriend people, and feel like I don’t put enough effort into my existing friendships. I still have trouble identifying my own needs, let alone knowing how to ask people to meet them. On some level, I’m still afraid that the more people know me, the less they’ll like me.
I’m devastated about the murder of Nex Benedict, a nonbinary teenager who was beaten to death in their school’s girls washroom. They were only sixteen years old. I really feel sad for their cat, who must be wondering where his human went.
It’s all too upsetting to regurgitate in detail here (there’s an article in The Independent that explains things), but it came after a year of bullying in a state that deliberately bans trans students from bathrooms, and even went to the point of hiring a far-right “influencer” to their state’s library advisory committee.
The right’s currently using trans people as a bogeyman to score cheap political points, and this encourages hate and violence. I remember back around 2010 when there was a rash of LGBTQ kids dying by suicide, particularly in Michelle Bachman’s district in Minnesota, which prohibited the discussion of LGBTQ issues. It’s depressing that the logic seems to be that dead kids are OK as long as the right ones die.
Christian nationalists in the U.S. are salivating at the prospect of a second Trump administration, and have already plotted out how they plan to go after abortion, contraception, LGBTQ rights, and even no-fault divorce. As they say, the cruelty is the point, and this ideology seems to be designed to empower abusive men, as if they had a God-given right to assault women and dominate anyone out of the “chosen” group.
It’s as if their God creates people specifically to live lives of abject misery, followed by eternal conscious torture.
I really don’t know how to segue from something this upsetting to a song, and I can’t think of one this week. Sorry.