To ourselves, fifteen years ago.

Low on spoons now so sticking this together from pieces of text files. One insight we had recently was about how we often forget things we've realized or learned and have to re learn them over and over. Actually is kind of funny that one of the things we forget is that we forget we forget. But it's not really funny that we forget some really valid insights and have to learn them over and over. For example this:

See, the thing is, if you have the perception of there being something seriously fucked-up about a certain person or group of people, it's almost certain that someone somewhere, or more than one person, has seen it and just isn't saying anything. But when you think you're all alone, it can really make you crazy, thinking you're seeing something that isn't there, when everyone else acts like there's no reason not to love this person or forgive them all their "little faults" because they agree with me/aren't attacking me the REST of the time.

(And btw don't jump on us for ableist language because we said crazy-- Julian wrote that and she actually did mean crazy. That kind of isolating situation can literally drive a person mad, disconnect them from reality. We've earned the right to use it in a reclamational sense through our own experiences, which ironically many of the people saying that it is always an ableist word have not.)

Anyway. Learned it years ago. Had to learn it again at least three or four times since then. Learned it again just very recently (no real good sense of pace of time passing right now). And will have to re-learn it again and again in the future. But this is part of the point of our writing things down, I guess. We may happen to run across an insight like that and save ourselves the spoons of having to re-learn it from scratch yet again. Just wish there was some way we could get it to stick in our brain permanently.

This is why we re-read our own writing so much. Because sometimes we have re-found those old insights at the times when we most needed them, when we were failing at bringing all the right patterns together to re-learn them on our own.

Anyway, reading comments to this today we also found this post that Ettina had made, about what advice she would give to herself when she was younger. Coincidentally, we had re-found something earlier today that we wrote almost two years ago, thinking along the lines of what advice we would have given to ourselves at a certain time in our life-- we kept thinking 16-17-- or to other people having similar experiences.

I do not know what we would really have done if we met us from 15 years ago. Probably we would freak out because the advice we would want to give them would be on how to avoid very specific bad situations that we got into, but if they managed to avoid getting into those situations and our life was changed, we wouldn't be the people we are now and I don't know how we would change. So instead of thinking about time travel mindfucky stuff, we decided we would send something like this instead.

Common memory remembers wanting to post it somewhere but not knowing where to put it. It had started with a discussion we were having with someone else, about how incredibly toxic ideas about "the person you should have been" can be-- to cling to thoughts about "where I'd be now if I had just been able to do this thing," to be constantly followed around by a phantom of the person you or others believed you "should have" been. Anyway, what we wrote in 2008 says it much better than we can right now.

( What we would say. Also, the 'but' at the beginning is completely echolalic and was not a response to anything previous to it. We're just posting it mostly verbatim with a few minor edits. )