Today I finished reading Insurgent. (I watched the Divergent movie with a friend, and I was curious about the books.) It was good, and I was doing ok suspension-of-disbelief-wise, but the big revelation at the end of the book apparently requires me to accept that nonviolence/ law-abidingness/ empathy?? are fairly straightforwardly controlled by genetics and brain structure. Which is… a lot harder for me to suspend disbelief for, than just “some people’s brains work differently and we call that being divergent” was.

Fictional character, trying to intimidate someone: And I’ll never let you do XYZ ever again! Muahaha!

My brain: Fine, I can to give up this thing that’s actually ridiculously important if it’ll spite your desire to scare me. I won’t XYZ ever again. See if I care. *crosses arms stubbornly*

Dear brain, sorry, but this is not actually a reasonable response! Even to a piece of fiction! This is not how it’s supposed to work.

Tbh this is a long-established pattern of thinking with me, but I have no idea what it started with. Brain, come on. Stop it.

Evil as mental illness- the short version

If you tell someone that they are inherently evil, that because of the way their brain works they will inevitably do evil things, you’ve removed their motivation to try to be good by telling them it’s impossible.

If you tell someone that only people with inherently evil brains can do truly evil things, and that this someone, in contrast, has a normal, healthy brain and is thus good, you’ve removed their motivation to try to be good by telling them it’s unnecessary.

If you frame “doing bad things” as a curable mental illness instead of an inherent one, that’s a lot more plausible, but it still means importing all the stigma and baggage people have about mental illness into every criticism of someone’s actions, which is only going to make it harder for people to admit they’ve done something wrong.

A while ago now, I happened across a Tumblr post with a suggestion about tattoos and changing interests. The poster’s idea was, a tattoo can be meaningful even if it doesn’t have one single specific meaning. One tattoo can mean/represent multiple things. Even things you didn’t know about when you got it.

I really like this idea. It might be the tipping point for me to actually get a tattoo.

So yeah I’ve been reading scary YA fiction lately, and it’s been going better than expected. On the one hand, I’m generally more anxious and stressed than I was as a teenager, and on the other, Real Life Teenager Problems that would have been uncomfortably close to home when I was younger are a little less scary. I’m glad I can do this.

Ages ago, I went through several of Disability in Kidlit‘s lists of books, and added a lot of them to my to-read list on Goodreads. A few days ago I started reading one of them, The Marbury Lens, and was briefly very confused, because I forgot which list it came from. It’s about PTSD. Whoops.

Anyway, so far it’s a very good book about PTSD. Maybe a little simplified or heavy-handed in how it describes some things, but describing people’s mental states is always hard.

Sparkly wants me to write about our vacation, and that’s fine, except eir class was cancelled today, and ey also wanted me to watch TV with em, and keep em company while ey played video games, and how am I suppposed to write when I have to listen to sounds?

(All the busy typing I was doing earlier was copying out quotes from an ebook so I could post them on Tumblr.)