nerdflighter | (no subject)

so earlier in another channel i was a little uncomfortable and i walked away and calmed down and came back and basically exercised self care and good practice. which is new! very new! if you had the misfortune of knowing me in february, i was an utter wreck with no ability to take care of myself.

and the reason im good at this, at taking care of myself (and by good i mean - decently competent, winning no awards yet) is because an entire server full of adults held my hand through it for over 6 months. that's a huge amount of labour and time and energy to sink into one person, and I'm very lucky I got that, because most people don't. most people my age have the same amount of mental illness and queerness and problems and nobody actually, you know, teaching them it's possible to set a boundary. or how to do that. or why it helps

having the regulation it takes to walk away from something that you're invested in but makes you uncomfortable is tremendously difficult - i had to be taught that several times. i was entrenchedly pro kink out of self interest, so that helped not kick me down the rabbit hole but basically? there's a lot of alienation and whole lot of lack of spaces where adults and kids can interact often enough that exposure therapy if nothing else teaches teens that adults aren't clowns handing out candy

and of course a 60:1 adult to child ratio isn't feasible or safe for teens other than me (I'm a lot more comfy around adults cause of bullying issues) but spaces for safe and curated interaction which allow teens to engage with complex topics without being dismissed or invalidated or overwhelmed is very very necessary and if you want to run a space like that, please do, I will join.

Threaded | Flat

Yeees. This is why I think letting kids into adult spaces can be really beneficial.

I'm also super excited that you're seeing real progress in yourself! And are better at taking care of yourself!

Thing 1: OMG YOU'RE HERE! On my home site! I am fucking thrilled.

Thing 2: Weirdly enough, I had a largely similar experience in my teen years on the Ancient Internet, where there was a forum called Readerville and a section of it called the Young Adult Reading Group (or YARG). It was not 60:1, but I do think it was 1:1-ish. Alice, omg, the dumbass I was as a teenager, someone once talked me through how to make creamed corn from a can. (You open it, put the contents on the stove, and turn the burner on until it feels warm. It was not hard.) But also I was from a conservative family in the suburbs, and all of a sudden I was hanging out with gentle, kind, friendly adults. Some of them were gay. Some of them were super into politics. Some of them were (gasp!) het couples living together outside of marriage.

If I ever learned anything about being a less-socially-inept person, it was there. And anything I learned about being an ally had its seeds in their quiet, steady example.

So yeah, basically, I'm super glad you have the space you do. <3