day144 - cold war
"you really shouldn't care so much what others think of you" is a beautiful name for a baby girl. a perfect closed loop system.
if Khrushchev and Kennedy blocked each other on instagram during the Cuban missile crisis we'd all be mutant cockroaches skittering around on a charred earth.
"austria, just tell me the truth. I know that bitch has been talking shit on her close friends story"
"whatever. i know we fought the axis powers together but she was always a shady little bitch. she'd always show me screenshots of her dms with Hitler."
"I saw the fucking pictures. I know she's been hanging out with that bitch castro. putting missiles in Cuba? who the fuck does she think she is??"
i think the longer you go without talking to someone the easier it is to metabolize all of the pain you feel and turn it into hate and bitterness. keep them entirely quarantined from your life so you don't have to view them in their full complexity, but still devote an unhealthy amount of energy to seething at the mental strawman you've created.
of course im biased- sick to death of not really knowing if my reputation deserves the damage or if I'm just another unfairly maligned mentally ill tranny, or more reasonably somewhere in between. coming up on two and a half decades on the planet and getting sick of being polarising, of making close friends who end up the bearers of sometimes invisible & mostly inscrutable grudges that i can never really comfortably dismiss.
on staying sane by ignoring the people who tell you you're toxic
I can't help you with this one honestly because I still love all the people who forcefully nope-d out of my life, not because I'm a zen goddess but because i can't entirely bring myself to imagine they're wrong. firstly, these are people i felt some kind of kinship or closeness or whatever with, even though I feel wronged by their judgement I don't want to dismiss their feelings outright because that's cruel. secondly ive derived a kind of sadistic personal philosophy from it all. rejecting the premise outright would make me just as oblivious and inconsiderate as they think, so if I hold that perception of me alongside and in contradiction with who i want to be, I can keep myself on guardrails.
I used to see those posts like "if you're worried about whether or not you're a good person, you are, because bad people don't worry about that kind of stuff". it's self-serving bullshit. I've always thought that the second I start believing that I am a good person, I've built the structure that lets me forgive myself for anything. "it's fine that I did so-and-so, or hurt so-and-so, because I am a good person and my motives are pure". it's not that I think I'm a secretly bad person, I just know that I'm flawed and prone to fucking up. my tone is hard to read, I'm sometimes more blunt than I need to be. I'm quick to get emotional, more impulsive than I like, attention & approval-seeking, and can come off as thoughtless even when that's not true.
so i can't help you ignore the people who called you toxic because by design that's not a refutable claim. simply don't be toxic. prove a negative. i carry the weight of every absence in the hopes that it will keep me from being too self assured to realise that i have the capacity to screw up. it's a bit dramatic, bit martyr-complex, but it reminds me that i have agency.