ant rants about the concept of “everyone else”
i’d normally drop this on antunderwater but it fits better here.
the thing that is wrong and abhorrent about me is that i’m different enough that it actually starts to hurt.
the theme of this semester is:
“everyone else is fine with it”
like in dance i hate the drills and the verbal abuse and the rush but “everyone else is fine with it” so it’s just me overthinking things.
and with angela i hate the fact she doesn’t text back and and leaves me hanging and literally forgets i exist but she does that with “all her other friends” and “everyone else is fine with it”.
and with anne i hate the fact that insulting people is apparently a way of showing endearment and i try to express it but “everyone else is fine with it” my brain is just doing things and taking it too seriously.
and with jae i’m just trying to understand something and he goes into this long convoluted explanation and i ask him to just make things simple and he says “that’s how i interact with everyone”.
and of course my dad, telling me that “everyone” who has gone through physics has had difficulties, so don’t worry about my difficulties, and “everyone” who has had a breakup has been sad, so don’t worry about my particular feelings of sadness, because in the end “everyone got through, didn’t they?”
i sometimes wonder if these oddballs i call friends have seriously gone out of their way to verify that “everyone is fine with it” and have found good evidence that “yes, everyone is perfectly ok and not secretly uncomfortable in any way, it’s just you that is the odd duck anthony”
what a ridiculously powerful word.
and maybe i’ve tuned or TRIED to tune to people all my life so maybe i’m setting the bar way too damn high.
but i want people to tune to me for a change. to do so with the intention of actually succeeding. to actually make an honest attempt rather than some cursory, one-time two-bit adjustment.
“everyone else is fine with it” is such an ADULT way of looking at the world. no child would ever accept that as the RIGHT way of thinking. it’s such a bizarre dichotomy to draw. even in my black and white world, why on god’s green earth would “everyone’s consensus” be a good way to define how you behave? as adults, I suppose we do that to fit in, to not shake the boat, but every single individual has their own blacks, their own whites, and it’s valuable to figure those out and to examine them.
painting everyone with the same brush and just assuming that everyone is that way is DANGEROUS. it’s the danger that comes from just saying “oh, i totally functionally believe in shades of gray” and then not actually going into those shades at all, and being even more black-and-white than i am, with no nuance to that black-and-white-ness. looking at you gray people up there (all five of them).
and people are like “anthony don’t worry about it” but i’ve been saying the same things on all five of those fronts for months and it’s not actually FUN. it’s not FUN to worry about things. i don’t WANT to worry about whether or not i’m sane, whether or not i’m overthinking things, whether or not everyone else is normal and i’ve just gone off the deep end of intolerance.
i whisper to myself that their standards aren’t mine. that it’s not selfish to have standards, and to want to hold to them.
in the majority of the world everyone is fine with abusive relationships. in the majority of the world poverty is a fact of life. in the majority of the world democracy is a foreign concept, and a good ruler is one that doesn’t completely screw you over, just screws you a little bit. in certain, very well developed parts of the world, everyone is fine with a state religion, or with online murder threats as a joke, or with covering up less palatable parts of their nation’s history.
standards are what make people valuable. they are what make people interesting. they are what make interactions mean a fraction of what they have the potential to mean, the tick and tock of our biological machinery.
and i’m becoming so bitter, so angry, so petty about this fact that i hold to be a “NO DUH” truth, and that everyone else seems to just...ignore.
i hate feeling this way. i hate feeling vindication when things fall through, or people get hurt, or things don’t go a certain way for someone. but it gives me those little moments of “aha, your way of looking at the world is full of holes”. it gives me little bits of “aha, caught you in your completely fucked up reasoning”. it gives me little bits of signs that i’m actually a sane individual who over the course of the last year of trying to readjust to this damn campus can still get something, anything, right.
it’s the same feeling i got when i laughed at the people who said my mom was in a better place while bawling their eyes out, because what their actions were didn't even come close to what they’re preaching.
weights off the chest and all that.
just to be able to say the sentences:
“this argument holds no water”
