some of y'all need to learn how to accept hospitality. stop assuming people are only offering to look after you out of twisted obligation that they don’t actually want to do. when you assume that, you are often denying someone the opportunity to genuinely show a friend or stranger love. even if you don’t really care about what they’re offering, it’s respectful of their desire to be kind to accept it anyways.
i had a bunch of girls i’ve never met over for a women’s group. every single one of them denied my offer to make them tea (despite already making myself a mug anyways), get them water, a scone, etc.
i can tell when people refuse to let me be a good host because they “don’t want to be a bother”. like no!! please be a bother!!! i want to serve you and make you comfortable in my home!
not to be like “we live in a society” but really do live in a modern culture than emphasizes individualism to the point where people will reflexively deny any help or kindness from others for fear of treading on their independence. newsflash: dependence on each other is what makes a community. next time someone offers you kindness, accept it instead of making excuses for why you don’t need it. otherwise you’ve robbed both yourself of being loved and someone else from showing love.
I’m turning 30 this month, and for some reason have become suddenly interested in material possessions. like what if,,,,,,,,my couch was nice. what if my sheets were nice. is this what happens to you??
I think a couple of things combine: you now have enough experience in the persistence of material objects to understand that if they don’t actively fail, they continue to define the shape of your material existence. The four stainless steel forks you randomly bought for your first place are now the forks you might, conceivably, have for the rest of your life.
You also have experience of the world around you. You realize, by comparison with your friends who like nice things, that your forks are shit. Incidentally, you also realise that despite having made choices that were defined by being broke or frugal, you do not actually get points for having shitty thin-handled forks that are annoying to use. You don’t get respect or appreciation or comfort or pleasure. After ten years of use out of $5 cutlery, you have inarguably gotten your money’s worth. You will get nothing else from them. You only get, forever, the experience of using shitty forks.
You have probably lived on your own for a few years now, perhaps even for more than a decade. Some items have fallen behind and been lost, thrown away, broken or failed; both others are still your companions. Depending on how nice they are, this is a source of comfort and frustration. Love to the hiking boots that have lasted! Affection and allegiance to the 20 year old band t-shirt! Disgust to the t-shirt bought last year that is sent to recycling for being so shit. Increasing admiration to the grand-grandmother’s mixing bowl, especially compared to the 2016 purchase of a mixing bowl that couldn’t handle the fast-paced lifestyle. Annoyance, disappointment and sorrow to smartphone case number 241, what the fuck. Smug pride in oneself for having the foresight, in an earlier house move, to splash out on a decent new mattress. As these items persist, you cannot help but notice that quality of materials/items is now obvious and visible, because you’ve spent more time with them. A 22-year old newly in possession of two knives - a cheap shitty kitchen knife and a good one they inherited - will have spent the same amount of time with both objects; when you’re 30, you’ve worked for 8 years with the good knife, while the cheap one (if you even recall ever having it) was thrown out in a fit of annoyance six years ago.
You have, at this point, in addition to using them, also handled and cleaned most of your possessions several times. You have realized, very materially and fundamentally, that you must care for these items for the rest of your lifespan, or theirs.
You are (possibly) out of the early desperate scramble to suddenly, instantly furnish an entire independent life (sheets, mattresses, winter coat, forks) with no money. This naturally led to restrictions on what you chose.
You are (possibly) out of the eaves of how you were raised. Many people spend their early twenties reconciling how they were raised with how they want to live. Perhaps you were raised to feel guilty for wanting things, such as toys or attention, which you later dutifully applied to things like education or new forks. Over time, you will have surprised yourself with how you met, identified, addressed, and reconciled these tensions from your upbringing; through conflict and resolution with parents/teachers/church/internet/social media, you have now arrived at what you have. If you had big things to confront, like coming out as queer, you may have thought this work was done. Now you suddenly find yourself confronting the weird beliefs you have that “you don’t NEED new forks” or “it’s bourgeois to want things” or “NOBODY spend £200 on HIKING BOOTS, what are you, rich?” And you might find yourself feeling like, well, actually, I’m grown-up and I hike and eat, actually.
So yes, I think that when you are 30 you are in the danger zone of getting a new couch.
Rewatching Goodbye My Princess thanks to @dangermousie’s posts and honestly I want to slow clap at how ballsy the writers are? I’ve seen a lot of historical Cdramas where there is a Misunderstanding based on (often) the male lead maybe killing the female lead’s family but it’s either an ancestral grudge (your father’s great uncle killed my mother and therefore we can be together) or some sort of mistaken identity (turns out it was the third cousin/identical twin). But goodbye my princess just went “nope let’s have the male lead kill the female lead’s entire family there’s no misunderstanding about it.”
I mean, it probably goes without saying, but the Found Family trope is so popular because so very many people are so terribly, terribly lonely
I adore the friends I do have immensely but god it would be nice to have like five people living nearby who I could call on for help or to hang out at any given moment
it’s also a very hopeful narrative. Found Family imparts this idea that you don’t have to start out life with a family, or with roots that go all the way down a family tree. That you’re not destined to be alone and without love simply because who you were born to didn’t make the cut. Found family resolutely insists that there is always a future, always a possibility for more, and that no matter how much time it takes to find them, they could always still be out there.
It’s about resolving loneliness, but it’s also about promising that you can find that relief later. It doesn’t have to be now, it doesn’t have to be when you’re little, it can be whenever it’s time.
For those of us without families in the traditional sense, or with families that had to be abandoned for any number of reasons, or even families that had to separate for long amounts of time, found family is proof that we didn’t miss out on love.
And I think when the world seems the darkest, it makes sense that a narrative about hope for the future and always having love on the horizon is popular. <3
It is also not insignificant to the found family trope that it isn’t just you looking for a family. They’re looking for you back, they want a family too (or sometimes they don’t want it until they have it and then they won’t give it up for anything and that’s good too). They are lonely and want what you want. There’s just something nice about the thought that you’re not alone even when you haven’t found them, that you’re not the only one looking, the responsibility does not fall squarely on your shoulders alone, and that maybe it will find you instead.
it’s easy to mock the concept of batman’s secret identity and think it’s ridiculous that nobody would realize that he’s bruce wayne but if some lady suddenly showed up late at night dressed in full military grade kevlar and started fighting crime in los angeles i wouldn’t look at that and think “ah it’s kylie jenner”
The OBSESSION with identity is so crazy like the view that when you do something it immediately becomes part of your identity and all the parts of you have to click together to become “person who wakes up early” or “person who reads” no you can literally just do something without restructuring your whole performance of personhood around it. I don’t know what to tell you except that you will never be able to have an entirely unfractured view of yourself or that you will be able to rationalize all the complex parts of yourself into the phrase “person who x” like you should just be doing things without performing them. Or aestheticizing them. Just try different things on and keep what works for you. Otherwise you will never learn and grow!
Ignoring your passion is slow suicide. Never ignore what your heart pumps for. Mold your career around your lifestyle not your lifestyle around your career. Art by MuAndCoco on Instagram.
