Ten pounds of personality in a five-pound bag
Today, my friend sent me this essay from 2021, and it resonates with me today.
https://thecorners.substack.com/p/if-you-cant-take-in-anymore-theres
Please care for your own hearts. Let the breaker do its job. Don’t wire it shut to force yourself to care about and try to fix every problem you encounter.
Do less.
Don’t do nothing. But you are allowed to do less.
Today on the Internet, I saw a commenter talk about how her relationship with her partner was a “long walk in, long walk out” one: i.e. that they moved slowly in building it up, and if they ever decided to break up, they committed to talking about it first and working on any problems they had.
I really like that attitude/philosophy towards relationships.
This webpage really explains the outcome of web enshittification better than plain words can.
Today, my friend mentioned the phrase “Knife Logic” to me, and when I asked her what she meant, she had this to say:
The logic that there’s always a knife at your back, that there’s always a scarcity you’re outrunning, and always someone who can replace you if you falter, and so if you choose to help another, you’re slowing yourself down by carrying them. That’s not to say that you should never help anyone, but it always has costs, about which one must be clear-minded. The brutal logic of scarcity and survival is always the deepest underpinning. Similarly, because everyone else is operating under those constraints, you should never expect others to slow their own flight from scarcity by helping you or extending you grace.
That’s…pretty harsh, but it also pretty much encapsulates my own attitude towards other people. I do help people, but I’m always very limited in how I do it, because I have a scarcity mindset about resources — probably due to my grandmother’s influence in my upbringing. She moved to America in 1930, and lived through the Great Depression. My grandfather literally starved as a teenager before cheating his way into the CCC’s (by bloating to make weight, per family lore). Scarcity is one of the Gods of the Copybook Headings that I don’t think I will ever be able to ignore.
Would I like to live in a post-scarcity society? Yes, I would. But technologically, we are not there yet. And until we are, this fact of scarcity will always be the fundamental underpinning of anything we do.
Years ago, I learned this phrase from… Captain Awkward, I believe?
I use this phrase pretty frequently, mostly to acknowledge my own irrational reactions to people I don’t particularly enjoy.
You don’t become cooler with age, but you do care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way of being cool. This is called the Geezer’s Paradox.
Found via this Mastodon link: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@obster/111142670514548111
Not me. I don’t want to remarry! But the title of this post is from a famous essay from back in the 70s about how much domestic and emotional labor the role of “wife” provides, and how even after women* entered the workforce en masse in the 70s, all of that labor still had to be performed by…the wife half of any heterosexual couple.
TikTokker Laura Danger reads the text
Labour, by Paris Paloma:
One of the things I’ve read that really changed my way of thinking about the world was the essay commonly known as Spoon Theory. I spent basically my entire youth as a completely able-bodied person, and while I had theoretical compassion for people with disabilities, I had no gut level understanding of what it was like to live with a disability. Reading this essay in college (or possibly shortly thereafter? I can’t recall exactly when it was) helped me understand why so many people couldn’t “just” do something or other.
Understanding disability is just one step along the road to understanding the whole system of intersectionality and how everybody’s lives are (or can be) different from one’s own. Not every essay will resonate with every person, and that’s okay. I hope this one helps you understand it a little bit better.
As I find them along the way, I’ll try to add links to this post to other versions of Spoon Theory that I’ve read, written by people who found the original metaphor to be limiting or inaccurate. One such alternative metaphor is a D&D one that uses “Spell Slots” as the day-limited resource that a disabled person must shepherd.
And that reminds me that some people with chronic illness refer to themselves/each other with the affectionate term “spoonie.” Now I’m wondering if a goofy bard with a chronic illness would refer to themself as a Spoony Spoonie.
This column is a great defense of having your own sense of taste or style or whatever.
As a side note, I would like to observe that the author’s use of “basic” doesn’t line up exactly with the usage that implies “middle to upper class white woman with UGGs and a cup of Starbucks.” Here, the given examples are a little lower class than that.
Which is NORMAL. Living like that is NORMAL. This is how most people live their lives.
Saw a TikTok today that explains Misogynoir (the name for the specific oppression that Black women face) in a very simple way (“for cavemen”).
At some point I’ll write a little more about intersectionality and what that means, but for now, I’ll just share this.
Emilybook 