Sometimes Sparkly talks about how hard it must be to be the significant other of someone who’s struggling/failing to cope with an undiagnosed mental illness.
I don’t know whether she thinks she’s talking about us or not.
And I worry that as much as I try I’m too fucked up for her.
*I want this out so I’m posting it before I finish the other post that contains awful thoughts. Sorry.
What will it take to convince Sparkly that she is not too normal or conservative for me?
She treats people with respect in person regardless of what she thinks of their choices or their opinions, and (a) that’s more than a lot of people do! (b) it’s all I would ask for. The ability to treat people decently and appreciate the good about them even when you think some of their beliefs are ridiculous is honestly a lot rarer than agreeing with me about feminism. And I would much rather spend time with someone who disagrees with me but is gentle about it than someone who agrees but is dogmatic and nasty about people who disagree.
It honestly scares me, that she might pre-emptively push me away over something that I don’t consider a problem.
Sparkly was channel surfing and stopped for a while on Toddlers and Tiaras. So, picture this:
Eight-year-old girl: My dream is to be on the United States gymnastics team for the Olympics when I grow up.
Her mother: Her arms have gotten too muscular and now they don’t look right in her pageant dress. And I can’t afford to buy her a different dress, so she’s going to stop taking gymnastics for a while.
That just seems so sad to me. You’ve got this girl who can do flips and chin-ups and all these cool tricks– things that many people can’t do at any age– and who loves it, and you’re going to tell her that she’s too strong and she has to stop.
I don’t want to say that pageants don’t take work or that there’s something wrong with wanting to look good. It just makes me sad to see this girl told she shouldn’t do something she enjoys because it’s not pretty.
It actually happened about two years ago. Kade Hanegraaf is a teenage boy who is Autistic and has Tourette’s Syndrome. Tourette’s can cause all sorts of different “vocal tics”– meaning, repeatedly saying words or making sounds and not being able to stop yourself. For Kade, it included screaming at the top of his lungs, many times a day. When he was fourteen, his family had him get surgery on his vocal cords to prevent him from screaming.
Why this is not quite as awful as it sounds:
The surgery doesn’t prevent him from speaking normally. In fact, Kade’s doctor says he is able to speak more easily since the surgery.
Why am I still saying this is awful? Well, I tried to summarize it for myself. I said this:
“They didn’t remove his ability to speak, just his ability… to… scream?”
It still sounds fucking dystopian.
I’ve pretty much gotten past it now, though. And I guess I did an okay job of handling it? I entertained a couple if worries for longer than I should have, and it took me a long time to get over it in general, but at least I didn’t go completely shaky. I’m going to sleep now.
Oh, also, I wanted to tell you:
first night of the con, and I’ve already had to do some constraining of shittiness.
One of my friends is dressed as a Siren from the video game Borderlands, which means she has a bunch of (drawn-on, fake) tattoos. And there was a guy who was looking at the one on her chest, and “jokingly” but kind of insistently complaining that he couldn’t see the whole design (when actually, she only drew on the parts that show. But it looks like there should be more under her shirt.)
We took the tack of “Well, there isn’t any more. You never see the character with her shirt off, so there’s no way to know what it should look like.” Though I sort of wonder what he would have done if she’d just been blunt and said “no way are you going to see my boobs, give it up.”
and RDG decided to actually move out and I am having feelings that I can’t even explain at all.
One of the worst things about the English language is that we use the same word for “siblings kissing each other” as for “parents raping their children”.
Some Open Space 