the correct number of eyes

answers to many names, including Kas, Moth, and Square. she/her. alive, alive, alive!

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why are people allergic to explaining things

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i had to fly a bit ago and for whatever reason a tsa agent pulled me aside and brandished a mystery implement at me and said "i need to check your hands" and i said "what is that?" and he said "i need to check your hands" and i said "what do you need to check them for?" and he just kept repeating "i need to check your hands" and refusing to answer my questions until a second tsa agent came along, asked what was going on, and then joined the first one in telling me that they needed to check my hands, it's required. i don't think i even actually said they could, i think i just didn't resist when they physically grabbed my hands. and then it was only after they swabbed my hands with the mystery implement and put it in some sort of scanner that they finally explained that they needed to check for certain substances (i guess ones that are associated with explosives or something?). like, could you not have explained that when i first asked? i think this whole process could have gone a lot faster if you were willing to answer questions about what is happening.

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not that i would have been comfortable letting them do that regardless. but i care a lot more about preventing people from handling my body when they're refusing to explain what they're doing or why. and while there are things worth taking a stand about at any time, i don't think this one would have been worth getting stranded out of state about.

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why are people allergic to explaining things

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i had to fly a bit ago and for whatever reason a tsa agent pulled me aside and brandished a mystery implement at me and said "i need to check your hands" and i said "what is that?" and he said "i need to check your hands" and i said "what do you need to check them for?" and he just kept repeating "i need to check your hands" and refusing to answer my questions until a second tsa agent came along, asked what was going on, and then joined the first one in telling me that they needed to check my hands, it's required. i don't think i even actually said they could, i think i just didn't resist when they physically grabbed my hands. and then it was only after they swabbed my hands with the mystery implement and put it in some sort of scanner that they finally explained that they needed to check for certain substances (i guess ones that are associated with explosives or something?). like, could you not have explained that when i first asked? i think this whole process could have gone a lot faster if you were willing to answer questions about what is happening.

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why are people allergic to explaining things

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i just rewatched the opening sequence to the watchmen movie and oh my god, it already blew my mind in high school but it's so much better now that i actually know a few more things about history

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and this isn't even getting into harm that's genuinely necessary! i read a book recently that was intended to educate people in healthcare about medical trauma, written by a medical professional who found that there weren't existing resources to help her cope with the aftermath of the extremely traumatic c section that saved her life. the whole tone of the book was "i know you've never thought about this before, but walk with me through this case study" and it's aimed at other medical professionals! it's aimed at the people who are doing this harm, and so many of them think that people aren't allowed to find it harmful just because it's necessary!

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so many trauma resources assume that your trauma is from a specific person or people who treated you in a way that society deems unacceptable. if your trauma doesn't fit that profile then you're left sitting there like. idk i dont think most of this stuff applies to me. where are the resources for people like me.

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if you were ever scared or in pain and were told that you had to grin and bear it because it's necessary for you to do the thing that scares and hurts you, you are allowed to say that that was traumatic. you are allowed to say that you were scared and in pain and that even if this was the least bad option, even if it was lifesaving, it still was not okay. something being necessary does not inherently make it okay.

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#i know this is not NEARLY the same thing#but i had to get braces against my will as a teen#i HATED them#i hated that i had them i didnt understand why i had to have them i loved my teeth how they were before#they hurt like a motherfucker and tore the shit out of my mouth#and the orthodontists never told me what they were doing to me or why#it sucked. it was awful.#unfortunately medically necessary i was never gonna get my canines because they were trapped in the roof of my mouth.#but this post feels kinda validating#because if i had any agency over myself i wouldnt have agreed to have braces#and wouldnt have agreed until someone explained the reasoning and process in a way i could understand (via @xx-riffraff-xx)

medical professionals love to not explain things to minors. i think it's because minors are functionally the legal property of their parents/guardians, and therefore treated as an extension of their parents/guardians rather than an entire separate person. therefore, if you explain the situation to the parents/guardians, and the parents/guardians understand and agree that it's necessary, it's simply not required to explain anything to the minor beyond "this is necessary".

your experience is the same thing. even if you weren't traumatized by it, you were still put at a higher risk of being traumatized because you were not given the support you needed to process and understand what you were going through. i believe the point of view that says "this is necessary, so it can't be harmful" is directly related to the point of view that says "this person is lesser than me, so i don't have to explain to them what i'm doing that affects them". they are both paternalistic thought processes that don't take into account the experience of the person being spoken over and acted upon.

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#my therapist likes to describe this distinction as ''Capital-T Trauma'' and ''lowercase-t trauma''#not in the sense that one is objectively worse than the other—just in the sense that ''Capital-T Traumas'' are more obvious#in terms of both the root cause as well as the symptoms typically being more overt—flashbacks and the like—#whereas ''lowercase-t traumas'' are more often accumulated from longterm patterns of relatively subtle harm.#for example ''undiagnosed untreated neurodivergent condition for 30 years'' or ''forced to get braces for no apparent reason''#unfortunately trauma intervention is still a pretty new field so it's historically focused on treating Capital-T Traumas#and researchers have only just begun exploring ways to adapt Capital-T interventions for lowercase-t symptoms. (via @ekho-ekho-ekho)

see, i don't love this, because i feel like the way in which it's pointing out "some of these traumatic experiences are more legible than others" is also legitimizing the idea that the legible traumas are bigger or more impactful than the illegible ones. when you hear "capital-T tsomething" you think "oh, this is a big one, this is an important one" and when you hear "lowercase-t tsomething" you're more likely to think "oh, this is being included even though it's not that important". i would be extremely offended if my big trauma was called lowercase-t trauma just because no one put the dots together for 20 years. i was very fundamentally damaged by it! i would like it to be framed as important, or at least not as unimportant, especially in the context of discussing the fact that cases like mine are frequently missed or dismissed.

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you'd think that the website of a company that sells products would show you the products but sometimes this isn't the case. i went through the entire squishables catalog a few months ago, and now every so often i check their new items and see one or two new things and then i check their retiring plushies list and it's chock full of things i've never seen before. "we're retiring our mosasaurus" literally since when have you had one of those

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jokes about gamers are very funny of course but i have actually been discriminated against for being a gamer

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people keep saying i clearly have adhd but the one time i managed to jump through enough hoops to actually get tested for it, they only gave me the test known to throw a lot of false negatives in gamers, and wouldn't you know, the test said that i (a gamer) don't have adhd.

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jokes about gamers are very funny of course but i have actually been discriminated against for being a gamer

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I think that your father is stupid and also that everyone trying to say you’re in the wrong for being frustrated (understatement) is also, stupid

as a point of clarity, my father was an extremely cool person. but you're right about my biodad, and i appreciate your saying so. he's so lost in the paternalism sauce that he can't see past it. i get why people wanted to go "sometimes things are not paternalism" but i don't think that an "i'm upset about paternalism directed at me" post is the appropriate place to be saying things like that. and quite frankly some of the responses to that post were pretty paternalistic in and of themselves if i'm being honest.

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The other day I went to the dentist and they said "surprise due to Problems we're doing no notice wisdom tooth removal on local anesthetic" and having already read your post about the experience was helpful in making this not nearly as unpleasant as it might have been.

i forgot to answer this when i first got it but i wanted to say, thank you for letting me know. this is basically my ultimate goal in talking about this sort of thing. i'm glad it's working.

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anyway all that is to say i'm sorry for pitching a public fit but also i was literally right and the people going um akshully were being jerks

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it's like that post about respecting someone as a person versus respecting someone as an authority figure. you understand

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my bioparents talked a lot about "maturity", and like a lot of people, by "mature" and "immature" they meant "willing to do what i say" and "not willing to do what i say" respectively. it was a measure of approval or disapproval rather than anything more broadly meaningful. "mature" for shutting up and following orders. "immature" for asking why they wanted me to do something. and so on.

i am aware that maturity is a thing, that there is wisdom that comes with age, that age often correlates with having more experiences and knowledge and that people often call this maturity. i've experienced my brain starting to work better as i've gotten older. i'm not claiming that age does nothing.

but age has nothing to do with why i was willing to speak to my biodad after almost a decade. maturity has nothing to do with it. i found one crucial piece of information that changed the way my entire life history looked, and because of this i'm willing to do things i previously wasn't. but my biodad's first reaction, despite knowing that i'd changed my mind based on specific new information, was to approve of the fact that i was doing what he wanted by crediting my "maturity". we'd barely exchanged a few words and he was already trying to drag me back into a world where his definitions matter and my experiences don't.

calling me "mature" was not a compliment. it was an attempt to reestablish control over me. what he meant was "of course you changed your mind when you realized that i'd been right the whole time and you'd been nothing but a stupid child." would you want to take that as a compliment?

and then i made a vent post about this, and a bunch of people decided to get on my ass about how um actually maturity is a real thing and you're stupid for saying it's not.

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everyone should be fucking grateful that i didnt start shit

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i know you think im a broken human being that youre deigning to express feelings of ownership over but you could at least pretend to actually care about my own feelings for five minutes

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cant you just take it as a good thing. cant we just look at this new information together and take it as a win for truthseeking and our potential ability to repair our relationship instead of proof that you were right and i was a stupid idiot child that you were justified in trying to imprison

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ive been kind and polite and good and now im done with that and i want to hunt people for sport if they say something i dont like