I Am My Own Sovereign

Part of my own healing process has been accepting that there's a lot of things in my past I won't be getting apologies for. Which means that in most situations, it's up to me to decide whether or not I can move on in those relationships without one.

Sometimes I can.

Sometimes I really can't.

So when someone from my evangelical past apologized for how things were between us back then, it really meant a lot. I've recently grown to appreciate how much more emotional awareness we all have about apologies these days, viewing them as something to offer another person because they deserve it—and because we care about them—rather than a transaction to assuage our own guilt. And yes, the recipient might not accept our apology. They might not forgive us. The relationship may remain broken. But acknowledging the way we've hurt someone, taking that first step back toward harmony and wholeness… it matters.

i am so so normal about media and have exactly zero mental illnesses

glues to my sweet father’s head while he sleeps

More of my Inner Demons series!

As a kid, my (undiagnosed) ADHD meant I had a lot of mood swings, often lashing out in anger and frustration. After a lot of training, I'm now able to work WITH my anger, rather than letting it bowl me over.

Okay y'all, going forward, this is what we're doing.

Shit's scary, I know. But we absolutely cannot afford to surrender to that fear, because that benefits the GOP. They want us to feel powerless, because they know we are not powerless. That's why they have so many shills and bots discouraging people from voting.

We will not demoralize ourselves and each other by doomposting in our moments of panic. If we have a panic attack, that's okay. But we are not going to spread that fear to other people in public. We will save our most scared thoughts for our private journals and close friends. And we will support our friends who are feeling hopeless.

We will remember that spreading awareness of Project 2025 and Agenda 47 has been hurting Trump. And we will continue to do this.

We will remember that right now, our only option is Biden, because without ranked choice voting, getting a third party candidate in is simply impossible. We might not like it, but that's why we're going to push like hell for ranked choice voting once we get his pruny old ass in to office for a second term. (And thank God, he can't have more than a second term; the Democrats will have to find someone else afterward.)

We will not spread conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are the weapon of the enemy. We don't need them.

We will not publicly mock Trump in all of this. Making Republicans feel even more victimized is a losing strategy. "But it's my blog-" I'm sorry, are you playing for political keeps or are you just here to fuck around and put everyone's life in even more danger?

We will emphasize the ways that Project 2025/Agenda 47 will hurt everyone. And we will keep talking about it.

We will remember that the UK and France have already avoided far right takeovers in their elections.

All right? You got that? Because we got this if we stick together and keep at this. Shit's bad right now but that doesn't mean it has to be bad forever. We got each other, and we can do this.

Isn't it weird that Christianity had convinced us that non-Christians were all secretly depressed and hopeless?

Like, with how christians have tried to proselytize to me, they talk like they think I'm desperately trying to fill some kind of void or some shit. They tell me I'm "losing my soul" like that means any more to me than threatening me with the Sith or Sauron.

And, like. No? I don't feel the need to be "saved" from anything. I don't feel some weird metaphysical angst now that I don't believe in some sky daddy. In fact, ever since I accepted the fact that souls don't exist, I've been better than ever!

It's kinda beautiful, don't you think? In the end, we discovered that the "pain" that Christianity claimed to be protecting us from wasn't painful at all. That the disease they claimed to cure was never there to begin with.

So have some fun! Do stuff that "poisons your soul!" Take pride in the fact that you no longer have to play by the rules of an imaginary dictator, or worry about an imaginary body part! Prove the Christians wrong by loving every goddamn second of your beautiful, sinful life. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, what's the point in not indulging yourself?

Besides, if you can feel this good without a soul, it clearly wasn't that important anyway.

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.