tealsummernights

purrs AND wags tail??

  • she/it

30-something, gray-ace, lesbian, polyam, t4t. trans cat/puppygirl ΘΔ


likes art, games, and garfield. also petplay and hypnokink? (and many more)


introverted and requires alone time.
will cry otherwise.
but also needs constant attention?
will cry otherwise?


hrt: august 8th, 2023
name change: february 20th, 2024


i belong to @Xyl-faedust 💖


profile pic by @motherfucker-receiver


18+ only


art, blog, microblog, etc.
tealsummernights.nekoweb.org/
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pleasepraise.me/mae
website league
bubsy.org/mae

pervocracy
@pervocracy

One of the biggest lessons I had to learn as an adult, and am still learning, and this is going to sound silly, is:

Problems Can Be Fixed.


Obviously not all problems, and a lot depends on available money/time/ability/assistance, but many problems can be fixed, and after identifying a problem, one should always consider if it's fixable.

Hole in your wall? You can spend years complaining about how dingy it makes the room look and how mad you are that some jerk put a hole in your wall - or you can look up "Patch Drywall" on YouTube and go to the hardware store and buy less than $30 of supplies ($12 patch, $6 joint compound, $7 "sample size" paint, $1 putty knife, $1 paintbrush) and get it done in an afternoon.

(Again, my point isn't "everyone can do this," because I realize sometimes $30 is a lot and sometimes standing up working with your hands for an hour is a lot. But sometimes you have $30 and are able-bodied but have pre-convinced yourself that only a drywall expert could do this and they probably charge like $500, and so you never bother to look up whether that's true or not.)

I'm having trouble saying this in a way that doesn't sound condescendingly obvious but it's something I genuinely struggle with. Some combination of early life experiences and inherent brainproblems makes it very easy for me to fall into a mindset of approaching even the most trivially fixed problems with a mentality of resentful acceptance.

It's embarrassing, honestly, how often I've complained about someone's unhelpful behavior and the friend I'm complaining at asks "have you asked them, like even once ever, to help you?" Of course not! They would definitely say no and then be mad at me forever for asking! I know this because [DATA NOT FOUND]

Sometimes it is literally as simple as sitting there watching a movie steaming mad that I can't hear the dialogue and the subtitles button is one centimeter away from my finger. Does it kinda suck that I need to do this because as soon as they got lav mics every director decided that mumbling was the new hotness? Yes! It does suck! That fact can be true in parallel with the fact that I still have some control over my surroundings. I am not betraying my commitment to Sound Editing Justice by taking care of myself!

(It's not always about justice and being in the right. Sometimes it's waking up and realizing that for the last two years you have been fumbling awkwardly around a lamp to turn it on because the switch is on the wrong side, and you could in fact just turn the lamp around.)

Not every problem can be fixed. But sometimes I really need to stop and remind myself that some of them can, and if my intuition is "no it's hopeless and I would make things worse," I can spare five damn minutes to double-check that.


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in reply to @pervocracy's post:

i’m in such a weird spot because my parents were also like that. my dad would often notice a problem and expect me to fix it, but would also never teach me how to fix it or anything. he just assumed i should know or figure it out on my own. and on one hand this was fucking awful and terrible and jesus christ and gave me some degree of ignoring a problem because of the fear it would go the same way or something, but on the other hand it’s also given me the knowledge and willingness to see a problem and just be willing to fix it.

i guess the messy part is that it’s hard to know how much of the latter came from the parenting and how much is inherent to me. some part of me feels that i would’ve been even more willing to dive into things and fix stuff if i had better parenting.

I think there's a better way to do that, where you give the kid hints about how to find the knowledge, and sort of talk them through "so we know what tools we need, what's the next step?", so they know you're involved and will step in if they're about to make a big mistake, but they're still learning to do the actual work independently.

yeah :/ unfortunately that would need to come from a place of wanting your kid to have space to learn and fail, as opposed to assuming that they should already know this and if they don’t then that’s a failure on their part and not your part

god this was such a Thing for me, i grew up in a household where like, Getting Something Dirty or Splashing A Bit Of Water Somewhere were cardinal sins and now it's like. did you know you can just clean bbq sauce out of a carpet, even if it's a light color, if you know what you're doing. problems? not permanent or catastrophic all the time. not even most of the time. incredible

thinking about when I accidentally chipped my parents' expensive hand-painted fruit bowl so I surreptitiously superglued it back together, being really careful to get the chip exactly in place so they'd never know

and this felt very sneaky but now I realize it's actually normal and considerate to fix your mistakes? mom, dad, I'm so sorry, I turned your prized bowl into a bowl that looks exactly the same but has 0.1ml of superglue in it, can you ever forgive me

a mentality of resentful acceptance.

this is so intensely relatable it hurts. i am not sure where it comes from, some mix of executive dysfunction and environmental factors maybe. like the hole in the wall example just immediately brings up renter's anxiety, but also I do this a LOT with work stuff, where I just do shit the hard way a lot because the "Easier" way actually turns out to be a mountain of fiddling to get working, and I'm on a (frequently entirely imaginary, self-imposed) deadline.

but also just ... i have fucking adhd, and also, like a lot of millenials, I had barely present parents who only interacted to yell at me about things or tell me shit to do, and didn't teach me how to like ... live. so when it comes to practical issues, sometimes it's like i don't even know how to start asking the questions.

Your hole in the wall example: Mine was a family where we didn’t have £30 but we did have holes in the wall. if you glue cardboard from a cereal box over it, you can just paint that. pro tip

100%. I feel like my childhood was a lot of "oh there are things that really suck that i have absolutely no control over". So my coping mechanism was to ignore them as much as possible. but now as an adult that's not very helpful anymore. having my desk be clean is actually nice...