kalkunium

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THE FLAILING AT THE END-

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skeletons

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some day ill be able to post this on thursday

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reblog if youve ever been called -bread -oprah winfrey -pianist -cake pan

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While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a clapping, As of ass cheeks gently clapping, clapping at my chamber door.

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turns out i simply cannot handle things or situations

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Jarls be like “I know a place” and send you to Bleak Falls Barrow

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Sometimes art is “finished,” and sometimes art is just at the point where if you have to look at it for another minute you’ll snap and commit crimes

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im writing this email and wishing you well mama we all go to hell

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please stop reblogging sylvia plath poetry 

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Interestingly, if your apology language is showing insight then it actively benefits from a lot of things that are discouraged in modern social justice contexts. Like, I appreciate it if someone says to me ‘hey, I was hostile towards you because I was brought up in an awful purity-culture religious environment and I never really learned that people like you were people’. 

But I think that’s exactly the kind of behavior that often gets a reaction of “so do you want a cookie for basic human decency?” or “stop making excuses”, mostly from people whose apology-need is accepting responsibility and who read that as refusing responsibility. 

It’s not an apology, and what’s appropriate for apologies is a little different, but recently I read a touching, smart and self-reflective post by a woman exploring the horrible sexism she experienced and the way it’d made it hard for her to sympathize with men and caused her to have the habit of starting interactions with men on a confrontational footing, and how she wanted to address that. And she ended by worrying that maybe the post focused too much on her history of experiencing and being harmed by horrible misogyny, and how this might come across as justifying the habit she wanted to change instead of explaining it. And I could totally imagine someone having that complaint, but wow, I really hope they don’t, because it’s way easier to connect with people when you get why they’re making the mistakes they do and why they have the needs they do and where they’re starting from, and we’d have lost something if the start of that piece carefully avoided explaining critical pieces of the picture.

Making excuses is actually easy to fall into, and it’s harmful and unhelpful. But making yourself understood - to yourself, not just to other people - and getting where you come from and what is actually making it hard to do the right thing is so important that I’d rather err on the ‘making excuses’ side than the ‘don’t make this about you’ side. 

And if people know their apology languages then maybe they’ll have the vocabulary to communicate “I need to hear that you’re sorry, and it’s not helpful for me to hear about what caused it, because I experience that as a shift of the emotional burden” or alternately “I find it really helpful to know where you were coming from”.