mads

genius among idiots

  • she/her

Trans CS college student

Will talk about minecraft and celeste at any possible moment.



chirasul
@chirasul

a lot of people were taught, from a young age, that sincerity will be punished. and, at the same time as they are taught that their sincere emotions must be hidden away, they are also taught that they must perform for other people; they must perform a moderately decent and polite persona with no strong emotions in either direction (but especially not negative emotions). they are taught to smooth over their rough spots: sincere expressions of negative emotions will make people think of you as needy, or moody, or bossy, or just a jerk. sincere expressions of positive emotions will make people think of you as ignorant, or annoying, or embarrassing, or obsessive. but, at heart, everyone wants to be able to express their sincere emotions, and everyone wants their sincere emotions to be accepted, or, at very least, tolerated.

i've found that if you can build a space where expressing sincere emotions isn't punished, but encouraged, you get people blooming and growing in ways they've never had the chance to. to express and be accepted sincerely is a human need that is unmet in a lot of people, maybe in most people, and I think it should be a goal of every community space to encourage sincerity, and to discourage the punishment of sincerity. even if the strong emotions that come with sincerity can be difficult to work through. i think it's worth it.

that's really what it means when people are saying "cringe is dead", i think. but where theory becomes practice is what you're encouraging (or discouraging) in your community space. i hope people understand that expressing some negative emotion is just as normal as expressing positive emotion, and that it's more important to explore where those emotions are coming from, than to try and punish the way those emotions are expressed. otherwise you get guys who bottle up everything until they explode, or people who perform so much that the person underneath the mask has completely atrophied away to nothing


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in reply to @chirasul's post:

just read your post. yeah lying as a habit or as a default response tends to arise when people are punished for not performing the "right" way. my parents definitely raised me to lie well because they punished me for certain things. but in a softer aspect, there's some ways where lying for the sake of others is an important skill. like most things, its complicated

Indeed, my mother cultivated an ability in me to lie confidently, on the spot, in a way where there is no visible seam to discern it because she was so punishing all the time, i dont think she actually knows anything about me anymore because i had to lie about my entire personality to her

honestly having a friendship with someone so much like me has got me to understand this on a whole new level than I did before even though wanting to be able to fully express myself is not a new desire. so many people expect you to stifle your real feelings. everybody needs relationships where you can go absolutely maximum buckwild, actually experiencing all your emotions in their depth and complexity without feeling like you're being a bother to others is good as hell for you