thought cabinet

LOL @mallory_strife . 8 million.. who knows?

How are you going today @mallory_strife ? What'd you get up to? Did you go out?

It's been sunny here so I took some kids to the park, taught one of the kids to ride 2 wheels, then they spalshed in the pool. They had a good time. I think I just got sunburnt!

@tyme

i am getting to the end of xenoblade 1. i've hit a rather nasty difficulty spike so my enjoyment has taken a hit

went to work before dinner. spent 2 hours cleaning an office. i may be figuring out a workflow now after a week on the job but the contract ends in two weeks, so

after i come home from work and have dinner my spoons get reduced to "watch youtube until falling asleep" and this annoys me. especially when i was only working for 2 hours

hit a level grinding wall. oh well.

someone i haven't talked to in ages reached out to me to wish me a happy early birthday. it's pretty much the only time we talk anymore. a few years ago when she had just turned 18 her mother died suddenly and then a month later her father died suddenly as well. i was surprised when she messaged me again a year later to wish me happy birthday because i thought she had actually physically died.

it's made me think a lot about the friendships that have seemed to wither away ever since i turned 18. both online and offline. and even now i catch myself growing bored and frustrated of the company of the few friends i still have now because i'd rather chase some imagined "cooler" relationships. and then there's the ones that i feel too guilty to rekindle because of how long i've left it cold and how terrible my social skills are.

i think about a memory when i was 9 of calling my then best friend (let's be real: she was a precocious crush, but i didn't recognise it then) who moved schools and having an incredibly awkward conversation in which i realised we didn't have anything in common and nothing to talk about. i remember her voice. i couldn't hear it back then but now i know she was grimacing the whole time. most childhood memories are tainted like this in some way or other. i wish i was better at being able to sit with memories because all the memories i've been retrieving recently have just made me want to shut down

It's an interesting insight @mallory_strife

I've worked with young people for a LONG time now, and what I notice is that friends me a lot when we are at school, teens etc. Then as time progresses, we still have 'friends', but in a different capacity and way.

I know even for me, after high school, uni, etc, 'friends' moved on, did what they do in life, and I found that all that time, my identify was defined by my friends. It took me a lot of time to find out who I was and be okay with it.

I wonder if this is the transition period into the 'big wide world' that so many struggle with?

I know for certain that I struggled immensely!

I apologise in advance if there is anything here that has caused upset or offence. Please let me know and I'll remove it.

Also, from your thread, "thought cabinet", I can see you are a deep thinker 🙂

Hope you are okay.

@tyme thought cabinet comes from disco elysium, because i am really that pretentious

rage ruminating again over how people keep cancelling/not texting me back/saying they'll have to leave early when i invited them to my birthday and how it is very easy to fall into the "nobody has time for anyone anymore" grudge. or begrudging how the people who will be staying are the people that i've been subconsciously pushing away because i guess i've decided they're not "cool" enough, and then getting guilty about that

maybe i just need to accept that in the big world the best you'll get is seeing your friends maybe once every 3 months. i understand how this is very stones in glass houses considering my previous post

@mallory_strife ohhh hun that sounds so painful! I have had some similar experiences, I remember my 21st birthday where I kept getting message after message in the lead up of people cancelling and ended up having a pretty miserable time. Even if the reasons given were legit, it still hurts.

Curious about what you mean about some people not being 'cool' enough... perhaps it's that you don't have that much in common?

I think maintaining friendships and finding time to make plans in modern society is really challenging. It's odd how we're so 'connected' (with social media and such) and yet it feels a lot harder to build and maintain solid relationships. Definitely not just you who is struggling in that sense.

Sending some hugs, if you want them 😉

⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡

@Jynx

i think it is also the feeling of being left behind or missing out, because former friends that i have fallen out of touch with or ghosted me seem to be going on such adventures while i am still a shut-in. and of course it feels like the people that i'd like to get closer to are slippery like fish while the people you have very little in common with are always there

but also it is weirdly, even with good friends, becoming tired of their company? and how it feels like we can only talk about the same things and do the same few things because they don't have the money or time for novelties. i have been finding them boring and predictable and i start getting guilty over how shallow this makes me

there is a girl in my uni cohort who... i think i will have to speak about her very vaguely... is a rising star in a media organisation that is antithetical to me and she's met many public figures that i'd rather shoot myself in the face than spend a minute with. and despite my aversion to this i still crave the recognition and the... mobility? she gets that i haven't gotten for reasons that are both in and out of my control. the killer punchline is that this rampant jealousy prevents me from making any new connections because i always start obsessing over what they don't have and how that means they're too alien to me to ever bother interacting with. i'm always making new excuses for why i can't sit with anyone

work was rough tonight so my CPTSD thoughts and urges are stronger than usual. i've been reading some ego-death comics that usually help but i feel like tonight will probably end with me using porn or a chatbot and feeling worse for leaning on that

Hey @mallory_strife , sorry to hear about how you are feeling tonight. I see that you mentioned talking to chatbots and porn will probably make you feel worse..

Can you think of what you could lean into to help you feel better?