Bad Man Bad
I recently remembered something from when I was like... six or seven.
Back then I thought that flirting amounted to the boy saying "girls are better than boys" and then the girl saying, "no, boys are better than girls." This was before I had any clue that being gay existed as, like, a concept. Why am I putting this sort of "trust me I'm woke" disclaimer on a childhood (mis)understanding of hetero romance. Blarg.
This didn't come from anything. I didn't read this in a shitty-ass book and assume it to be accurate because kids don't understand satire. Something in me made this, either out of whole cloth or piecing together fragments of things that the culture had dropped on the floor and I had crawled through the forest of adult legs and collected them rather than given them back. (That I phrase it in this way and considering it to be "stealing insight" because I learned something from a source other than school or a dry book is its own thing, but I won't explore it because everyone already knows about that phenomenon.)
Even as early as that, apparently the only thing I could imagine as forming the basis of any sort of love relationship was mutual self-loathing. I'd had it hammered into my head even that early that so much as thinking someone is pretty was evil. (Being brought up to believe in a mind-reading deity did not make this better.) So I guess the only thing someone was allowed to like about me was the gaping hole where a personality was supposed to go (oh you would not believe how early "your interests are not valid things to like" started), and only in terms of "finally, someone who understands what it's like to be an empty husk."
I don't know if this is too much projection onto the past, but the factual part (that I thought this is what flirting entailed) is completely accurate.
I wonder how common this experience is. I've never heard anyone describe having believed in this weird idea of romance, but people suppress all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. Or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.
At some point I'm going to subsume this into a longer whiny post, and then Scott Alexander will defend it and then I'll probably hang myself for becoming what I swore to destroy.
Back then I thought that flirting amounted to the boy saying "girls are better than boys" and then the girl saying, "no, boys are better than girls." This was before I had any clue that being gay existed as, like, a concept. Why am I putting this sort of "trust me I'm woke" disclaimer on a childhood (mis)understanding of hetero romance. Blarg.
This didn't come from anything. I didn't read this in a shitty-ass book and assume it to be accurate because kids don't understand satire. Something in me made this, either out of whole cloth or piecing together fragments of things that the culture had dropped on the floor and I had crawled through the forest of adult legs and collected them rather than given them back. (That I phrase it in this way and considering it to be "stealing insight" because I learned something from a source other than school or a dry book is its own thing, but I won't explore it because everyone already knows about that phenomenon.)
Even as early as that, apparently the only thing I could imagine as forming the basis of any sort of love relationship was mutual self-loathing. I'd had it hammered into my head even that early that so much as thinking someone is pretty was evil. (Being brought up to believe in a mind-reading deity did not make this better.) So I guess the only thing someone was allowed to like about me was the gaping hole where a personality was supposed to go (oh you would not believe how early "your interests are not valid things to like" started), and only in terms of "finally, someone who understands what it's like to be an empty husk."
I don't know if this is too much projection onto the past, but the factual part (that I thought this is what flirting entailed) is completely accurate.
I wonder how common this experience is. I've never heard anyone describe having believed in this weird idea of romance, but people suppress all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. Or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.
At some point I'm going to subsume this into a longer whiny post, and then Scott Alexander will defend it and then I'll probably hang myself for becoming what I swore to destroy.
Comments
Post a Comment