could you please make me a "the trouble with love" header, which sticks with this icon thank you 💗 and sorry im bothering you a lot 💗
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because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.
you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.
you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.
don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.
if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.
you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:
how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!
aren't you happy yet?
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why aren't there more mysteries that take place in nursing homes & retirement communities. i want to watch a group of deranged retirees-cum-amateur-detectives combine their powers of:
decades of life experience
boredom-fueled busybody shamelessness
access to the most gossipy next-door-neighbors in existence
"I am too old to be arrested and/or give a shit" attitude
and solve crimes. this should be an enormous subgenre.
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It drives me a little spinny when I see people posting “Why Aziraphale doesn’t just keep his books at home if he doesn’t want to sell them” because it seems to me to so clearly be a riff on real life antiquarian bookshops?
I worked in a used and rare book shop for five years, and have frequented them since I was young, and Aziraphale is like, a type of guy who just exists. An older fellow who refuses to keep his books in any sort of order, neglects to write prices in, opens at wildly varying hours, and by all accounts does not seem to want to be in business at all. The answer I found, by the end, was because many of them were doing it as a sort of retirement hobby. They made enough money to keep the lights on and to buy new rare books to look at.
I swear to you: nobody in the book business would bat an eye at Aziraphale. Especially if his shop had been there for generations. They would assume that the occasional loose encyclopedia plate sale would be enough to make rent, or that Mr. Fell had business and land holdings elsewhere.
And I assume that though he doesn’t want to sell them, he would LOVE a curious browser. Antiquarian vendors often adore it when you ask how to find a rare book, because the thrill of the hunt is often better than actually owning the volume. Anyone can have a private library, but owning a quaint little bookshop is a saucy way to brag and chat with other book lovers, and you can’t put that on your shelf at home.
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I can not stress enough that the scene where Percy sends Medusas head to the gods is literally what made me fall in love with Percy as a character bc think about it hes just started his first quest, he's in more danger then he's ever been in his whole life, knowing almost every monster and God is currently out to get him personally, and the most important person in his life has been kidnapped by the god of the dead - so what does he do? He chooses to actively makes the situation worse by sending a middle finger right to the gods bc yeah fuck the gods
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