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malymin...I feel like there's no point to me writing on my blog, or anywhere else, because I don't respect or trust my own thoughts and feelings. I don't feel like i have anything meaningful to say. Anything I ever could say has probably been said by someone smarter, more experienced, more disciplined, with firmer morals or better poltiics, more articulate and well-read. I don't feel like I have any unique experiences that would confer novel enough insights to compensate for my deficiencies as a person.
Someone can say that they like something I wrote, but that's never enough to make me feel like it had value on its own. General positive regard is a nothingburger; people can feel it about something that has nothing new or interesting to say, soley because it's by a person they like, or about a topic they like, or it's written in a style that garners Big Emotion and hits certain simplistic buttons in their brain (nostalgia, coziness, righteous anger, lust, etc) that override deeper critical thinking. it says nothing about quality of content. it says nothing about if i've actually raised good points or opened a discussion worth having. it doesn't say if anything i've said has value - intellectual or ideological or artistic or else-wise.
i don't understand how general positive regard can be "enough" for anyone. it's so detatched from anything specific about what makes you or the things you make worth their time. people feel it all the time about "essays" that are just fluff with no coherent argument, about fiction that's trite and banal because it happens to contain some tropes they enjoy, about kinkade paintings and funko pops of a guy they remember from a movie.
I don't want to be liked without a coherent reason. I don't want to have anything I say be liked without a coherent reason of having provoked something meaningful. I want to provide value, usefulness, something, and even when people seem to enjoy my company, I don't feel like I'm anything more than another mediocre soulless pseudo-intellectual who only mimics real thinking and creativity through imitation of their betters.
Someone can say that they like something I wrote, but that's never enough to make me feel like it had value on its own. General positive regard is a nothingburger; people can feel it about something that has nothing new or interesting to say, soley because it's by a person they like, or about a topic they like, or it's written in a style that garners Big Emotion and hits certain simplistic buttons in their brain (nostalgia, coziness, righteous anger, lust, etc) that override deeper critical thinking. it says nothing about quality of content. it says nothing about if i've actually raised good points or opened a discussion worth having. it doesn't say if anything i've said has value - intellectual or ideological or artistic or else-wise.
i don't understand how general positive regard can be "enough" for anyone. it's so detatched from anything specific about what makes you or the things you make worth their time. people feel it all the time about "essays" that are just fluff with no coherent argument, about fiction that's trite and banal because it happens to contain some tropes they enjoy, about kinkade paintings and funko pops of a guy they remember from a movie.
I don't want to be liked without a coherent reason. I don't want to have anything I say be liked without a coherent reason of having provoked something meaningful. I want to provide value, usefulness, something, and even when people seem to enjoy my company, I don't feel like I'm anything more than another mediocre soulless pseudo-intellectual who only mimics real thinking and creativity through imitation of their betters.
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Date: 2025-09-20 08:50 am (UTC)And okay, this next part is a string of bad things that happened to us. But we're not trying to downplay your situation; we're trying to emphasize that finding ourselves in increasingly worse situations didn't actually help us get rid of the feeling that we deserved to suffer and had no worth. Basically: We're currently living in a homeless shelter after spending two months living in our car, after our brother lost his house (that we were living in) because he didn't pay his property taxes for three years, and before we moved in with him, we were technically homeless and moving between illegal boardinghouses in Los Angeles, and before that we were in an emotionally and financially abusive relationship while living in a moldy apartment that made us sick and.... What I mean to say that continually, throughout all these times and situations, we have been constantly extremely vulnerable to rhetoric which stirs up old patterns from our past and makes us feel like, as you put it, "I deserve to be tortured and noone else does because i ontologically Have Less Worth than even the worst people on the planet, in a spiritual and metaphysical sense." If anything, those patterns made us more vulnerable to things like abuse and homelessness, because if you believe you deserve torture and suffering, what do you do? You let yourself sink into bad situations. You persuade yourself to stay even when you KNOW it's bad, because you think you deserve it.
We have never been able to outrun or shake off these patterns by letting ourselves descend into worse situations, seeking them out, or finding ourselves in them involuntarily. The patterns come for us and they find us where we live. Even if that place is in a car. The "I deserve to be tortured endlessly and infinitely" feeling hits us particularly hard in the... ex-Catholic patterns, I guess.
The best we've been able to do at shaking them off has come from analyzing the social situations we're in, identifying specific triggers that make us feel that way (when we can), and starting from the base assumption that the problem is not in us. That the problem is located in some external set of patterns, often ones we've absorbed from people we hung around with, even if we thought we trusted them - "lie down with dogs, get up with fleas." Sometimes it's specific people. Sometimes it's specific communities, movements, ideologies, fandoms; sometimes it's a general metaphysical outlook that seeps into everything that someone says.
But if you can start with the conviction that you are not perceiving a badness in yourself, that you're perceiving a wrongness or twistedness in the patterns that surround you, which are being disguised as normal behavior (like, for instance, the repetition of "you are complicit in these things" as a thought-terminating cliche), it is a step, at least. It was a step for us. It was a step that helped begin the long process of coming back from the long tunnel we'd gotten lost in.
-Amaranth, Istevia and Julian. This one ended up very co-written, somehow.