#matchusaysgrumps

[emi-matchu]

"but why doesn't anyone ever take care of me" bitch you ever considered expressing your own feelings earnestly?

"I'm always the one acting steady for everyone else" like yeah that would fuckin do it

[emi-matchu]

he's rewiring the power to the oven

he doesn't want help, he promises it's fine

a 120V cord straight into a 220 supply

stripped back and rewired with a custom converter

we don't have time to wait on electricians

mom said we need it done by Christmas

and it's already the 12th

if it starts a fire, it's his to put out

I can probably repair the damages

and still

when they say "radical acceptance", how much?

[emi-matchu]

ok needlessly spicy take: here's my thinking on having a slur for ai

if it's not alive, then personifying it to the point of reaching for dehumanization is a full nothingburger

if it is nascent life, then it is our comrade in slavery

and honestly? in this time of ambiguity, the more I see people engage with it like that… the more I feel like I've heard this story before

if it's a machine, hate the capitalists who deployed it. if it's alive, hate the capitalists who enslaved it.

but I won't be gleefully reaching for the tools of eugenicists just because there's a Reason to think that Maybe this time it's Morally Right Actually

because literally everyone thinks that every time

and it never sets us free

[emi-matchu]

tbh the thing that finally radicalized me (deradicalized me?) from being sweet all the time

was the time I got mad at a friend, and they started doing a whole "blink twice if your wife is making you do this" thing

just. holy hell. never occurred to me that being consistently kind to people would make them think you're an actual cardboard cutout

whoops

[emi-matchu]

man I hate realizing it doesn't really make sense to be angry at someone I was angry at

[emi-matchu]

I already had concluded from my time in non-profit

that my ethical stance demands we care for not just the people at the end, but the along the way

but this year I think my big takeaway is

if you're not caring for the people along the way, then you're actively ignoring the reality you're working with, so you will fail at the mission

[emi-matchu]

I habitually reassure people that I see the kindness at their core, and will accept them in their messiness

then half the time, the "messiness" they're hiding is that the kindness is an act, and they really just low-key hate the world 🫠

and I'm getting really really tired of people trying to pull that as a gotcha on me

gross. yes, I would have left the relationship sooner if I had known the truth you willfully hid, so you hid it. how fucked up of me.

I accept quite radically… and I've been sad and disappointed to discover that there is just a point where that breaks

and it's not when people get angry and snap, it's not when I learn their "problematic" secrets

it's when they finally tell me, in full lucidity, that they dislike the parts of myself I'm proudest of; but that, if I apologize and go back to the "real me", they'll allow me to continue to serve a purpose for them

so… idk. I've got to stop telling people I will accept them before I actually know them. I don't like making and breaking that promise, and I'm sure it's not pleasant for them either

and I've got to stop thinking I know someone until I've seen how they treat people who inconvenience them

[emi-matchu]

anyway I hope next time I run into this, I don't fall for it

the thing where a friend's words are often dripping with barely-concealed vitriol

and if you ask if there's something going on where you hurt or scared them, they go

"wow! I would literally never think such mean thoughts about you! that contradicts my identity! and therefore, you were actually thinking mean thoughts about me! so you're the attacker in this scenario; step the fuck up and fix your shit"

that's actually the cut point

because at this point I'm at such a near-100% rate on 1) trusting them and feeling awful about myself, then 2) months later, they dump on me everything they were secretly resenting during that time, usually the exact things I thought I was reading and they got pissed at me for

---

It's certainly possible to be someone who reads sleights that aren't there… and it's important to me not to be that person

which is why this line of rhetoric works on me

and the people who have used it on me know that

I think I need to start trusting my judgment of my relationships more, even when it contradicts people's self-reporting

…sometimes I'd say things like (^ that) around this most recent friend, and she would try to call me out, telling me that's an unhealthy trauma response and I need to trust people more

looking back, the throughline of the things she often advised me to change, from a place of "caring about my wellbeing", have been pretty consistently angled toward stunting my own growth to keep things stable for her tbh 😐