🌟 what do you like about yourself? (must choose at least 3 things!)

i care a lot about the people i love, and actually do a pretty decent job of being kind or helpful or at least not actually actively detrimental to them most of the time. or at least this is what my evidence suggests, given 1. how i feel about other people acting in ways toward me, compared to ways i act 2. what people say to/about me, including in ways where i wouldn’t expect it to just be them being polite 3. that several people seek me out repeatedly for interaction or to be in some way vulnerable. this is my evidence for that claim. on the other hand, i am not convinced that “evaluating evidence” is my strongest point, so who knows. but yes: i am often nice, and often thoughtful, and sometimes help, and i genuinely do care deeply about making things better and not worse and being very deliberate about so doing, and only some of that caring is a self-serving morality, some of it truly is because i want people around me to be happy.

um. i like almost all of my bones. they’re mostly really good at being bones! my spine is sort of fucked but never in a way i’ve actually perceived so thats fine. my ribcage/sternum, on the other hand, is a real dick, but some things must simply be endured.

i like that i am, in various ways, good at school; i just do. i actively enjoy taking classes and talking to teachers, and it makes me happy to be good at it, although probably part of why i like it is that i’m decently good at it. i’m not actually good at anything else i like, pretty much: i can’t make particularly good art or sing for more than a few minutes or write any prose that goes anywhere. i’m not even really good at my job, let alone any other job. i can mostly just write convincingly not-bullshit bullshit essays and talk a lot in classrooms, and i can do it better than many other people, and i know that’s kind of a stupid shithead thing to like about yourself but i absolutely do, it makes me happy to be good at it.

wow this was embarrassing. fuck you, i’m smart and interesting and likable for many reasons and i’m actually a decent poet. i’m good at analyzing some specific kinds of biology articles. i’ve had up to four critical thoughts.

☀️ what do you like the most about your best friend?

i have several people who i count as my best friend despite very distinct relationships with each of them and i can’t choose which one to answer this about. this is maybe a misapplication of the term altogether but for one thing at least two of them read this blog and for another fuck you relationship hierarchies are for. uh. people who don’t have this problem and have better terms for distinct long-term relationships with the people in their lives.

um. one of them: 

i appreciate how willing they are to value what will actually make them (&me) happiest over what seems most normal/high status/socially acceptable/whatever, esp since it’s something i struggle with. i like how willing they are to listen, and that they don’t mind when i need advice and reassurance on the same thing repeatedly, or when i ask for advice that’s just the exact same advice i’ve given them in the past. i like how smart and thoughtful they are, and how they make me feel truly valued and liked. ok all of that was actually about two of them. i like how one makes me feel a really deep understanding and kinship about our shared jokes and cultural context and also sharing our writing, and how the other one makes me feel that way about our shared intellectual interests and worries about the world….and also sharing our writing. they’re both really good writers. and with prose, no less, which i am terrible at and eternally envious of.

🍦 what is one treasured childhood memory?

uh. sorry, but: absolutely the city of chicago science fair in seventh grade. it was in the museum of science and industry, which i already found very cool since i’d never been there before, and it was basically my first-ever opportunity to have real people, real serious adults who knew about things, actually listen to me talk because what i was saying might be valuable rather than because their social role as my relative and/or teacher required it. 

one of the great frustrations in my life as a kid was that no one would ever listen to or believe me about anything unless they already expected, for reasons beyond who i was, to do so. this was of course because i was eleven, but there can only be so many comforts for being unable even to articulate “no, actually, i’m neither lying nor making things up nor confused by the concept of object permanence, i am certain that the keys you are looking for were on the table just a minute ago, and no, that doesn’t mean i stole them, why would i do that?” in a way that anyone else finds convincing.

so anyway, science fair was exciting for a lot of reasons– i genuinely liked my project, i met a bunch of other kids who i liked, i got to talk so much and well that people gave me a medal for being good at talking– but i mostly remember the glow of finally being good enough at talking that, with the right context and a sheet of posterboard, people actually listened to me and engaged, like i was an entire, serious human.

i’m sure it’d happened before that, probably many times, but you know. one’s brain forms these narratives.